A shitty, earnest play starring someone else

by applecrumbledore

Summary:

Sam could see himself letting his carefully-cultivated life go totally off the rails at Dean's sudden appearance: skip lectures, bail on friends, hole up with him in his stuffy little dorm room and fuck each other's brains out like they were in the pay-by-the-hour motels of their youth, waste his hard-earned money on greasy takeout and hunt some motherfucking ghosts, all while being hopelessly, unapologetically in love, the way he was before he had anything else to think about.

Notes:

If anyone's jumping into this story, not the series, it can stand alone.

I read this great fic some time ago where Dean meets jess and when I kept writing this series I knew I wanted to do something similar. this is close enough to a college AU to get my hackles up but you're just gonna have to trust me.

thanks for all the kind words on this series. this is the last entry as far as I can tell, as it bumps nearly up against the pilot.

one note: I'm not american and I don't learn any more about america than I absolutely have to to write these fics so if anything is inaccurate about stanford I don't care

 

April 2002

 

Sam went away to school, and he tried.

He made himself go where people were. He never skipped lectures, he joined study groups and a soccer team, got a job as a dish pig at a greasy bar, and took up every single invite that was extended to him even when he didn’t think it would be fun, which meant that he went to a couple awful improv nights, played ultimate frisbee at least once and got stoned at an open mic night. He tried everything, partially because he wanted to but also because he was too terrified not to, high on loneliness and independence for the first time ever and spurred on by college boob comedies into thinking university had to be the best years of his life.

All of it meant that he made friends, slowly. He’d had friends in grade school but never for longer than a few months, and the nature of adolescence meant they weren’t that deep. He was surprised and annoyed to find that he got along easier with guys than he did with girls, and he didn’t want to be that guy, so he made an effort to get less awkward about it. When he told Dean over the phone, Dean said, just imagine women are real people, and Sam said you’re so annoying to talk to when you’re not in punching distance, which was code for I miss you, but it had only been a few months and they weren’t there yet.

Having friends he actually talked to, he had to get used to being Guy With a Bad Childhood, which came up in innocuous little ways often enough that he watched people take note. He told a lot of lies and half truths, secret analogues for the real thing, but the picture it painted was the same: dad was an asshole, poorer than poor, possibly in trouble with the law, moved a lot.

Dean, strategically, didn’t really come up.

At best, starting school was the most exhilarating thing that had ever happened to him, and at worst, it felt like being in a shitty, earnest play starring someone else. He tried to only think about the best, and if he slept with a handgun under his pillow, wearing one of Dean’s old band tees, that was nobody’s business but his own.

 

—

 

The first time he thumped his way through sex with a woman, it was with Jess.

She lived across the hall from him in his dorm, and they met in a study group for an economics class they were both in, then saw each other again at the bar Sam worked at off-campus, part time, because the scholarship covered room and board but nothing else, and then they got enough mutual friends in order to hang out and keep hanging out.

He liked her instantly and more all the time. He thought she was very down-to-earth for a hot girl. Beautiful people were, in Sam’s experience, Dean, which was to say insufferable and deeply aware of their own beauty. Dean wielded hotness like a baseball bat—offense, defense, a way to break people—but Jess grew up too tall and too skinny, she said, and seemed to have gotten hot without realizing it at all. So hot that Sam hated every word that came out of his mouth when he was around her, but he was used to that, and she seemed to like it.

He didn’t get what she saw in him, but it must have been something, because she invited him over one night to watch a movie when her roommate was conveniently out, and thirty minutes in, she was in his lap. It would have been twenty if he was brazen enough to think she liked him at all.

He was laying in her bed afterwards, in her room that looked just like his except mirrored and a double, on the other side of the hall. She had posters up on her half, bands Sam didn’t know, and photos of friends and family tacked up over her desk. A thin scarf was thrown over her lamp and it made the light glow pink. It looked nice, when they were doing it, made it feel like a movie.

Her hair was loose, and it was everywhere. He had to keep trying not to put his elbows on it. He wanted to bury his hands in it again because he’d gotten a chance earlier, but not for long enough, and it smelled so good. Intentionally good, not just musk and pheromones, and that was a whole new world. There wasn’t enough room in her bed to curl up, so his ankles hung off the end, but she had her head pillowed on his arm and was curled towards him and he couldn’t remember ever feeling so unabashedly, chest-thumpingly masculine about anything. It was nice, but weird and a little unwelcome. It was the opposite of when Dean put his legs over his shoulders and folded him in half.

His heart was still racing. He stared up the ceiling and could feel her hair against his neck. He could smell her all around them, rich and raw on his hands, his face, on her. The scent was somehow familiar but mostly not at all, different from the juvenile tang of boy-armpit and dick, jizz and the artificial sweetness of lube. His only familiarity with how a woman smelled, he realized, came from smelling it on Dean, and God, wasn’t that something awful.

“That was nice,” Jess said, running her fingers over his chest over and over again. It was one of the first things they’d said since he came back to bed after throwing out the condom. Nice was good, since he’d been practically vibrating out of his bones with nerves. He thought maybe he made her come with his fingers, but it was possible that she was just being generous.

“Good!” he said, too enthusiastic. “Good, yeah, it was— yeah, you’re incredible.”

He couldn’t stop looking down at her tits. He’d never seen a girl naked in real life before. He felt like a kid. He felt like a virgin again, which, for all intents and purposes, he was. He had to stop himself from thanking her after he came.

She laughed. “Me? God, I just showed up, you are— I’m gonna walk funny tomorrow.”

He blushed, instantly. He sat up to try and look down at her.

“Sorry! Was I too— are you—”

“No! No, I’m fine, you’re just, uh. You’re proportionate.”

When he first took his dick out, she did a weird, unintentional kind of laugh and went, “Oh, woah.” He tried not to let it go to his head, but a second comment on it was more than he deserved. It was insane to think he could make a girl like Jess stuttery. He looked down at his dick, still flushed and thick and laying sticky against his thigh.

“It’s not that big.”

“It’s big,” she said again, also looking down at it. “Just— I don’t want to make you feel weird, but, you know. It’s nice. I mean, you’re a big guy, just in general, you’re probably used to—”

“I’m not used to anything,” Sam said, before he thought better of it.

He was, actually, pretty used to this specific thing. Dean thought it was hilarious that someone as bashful and gawky as him had been gifted with a huge dick, and brought it up as often as he could. Like giving a nuke to a bunny rabbit, he said at least once.

“About that,” Jess said slowly, startling him out of his glazed-eye Dean State. She slid back along his arm until they were far enough away to look at each other. “I swear I’m not trying to be mean, but… have you… been with many girls?”

Her eyebrows were apologetic. She was so polite. He had a split second to make one of the biggest decisions of his life, because the only people he’d ever told about being with Dean—not who Dean was, never the whole truth, but that he’d been with a guy, period—were no more than acquaintances, kids from school. No friends, no one who knew him the way Jess had started to know him. 

He imagined what it would feel like to tell her, and it was infinitely better than the thousand times he imagined telling John just to be defiant, spitting and snarling his worst nightmares at him. Telling Jess would be trusting, cathartic, and he already liked her a lot, so if she didn’t like it, it was better that he found out before he got in any deeper.

He took a deep breath.

“You’re the, uh, first girl, that I’ve been with,” he said, ten kinds of awkward and with unmistakable emphasis. 

To him, it was obvious. He felt like he was a good kisser, and he knew he could fuck, but his foreplay was, to put it kindly, bumpy. He figured that said something pretty clear about what he was used to, but you had to look for it, and most people didn’t—most people had ideas about what it meant for guys to be with other guys, and Sam knew he didn’t fit into any of that very well. Society had made it one hell of a narrow fit; the couple people he mentioned it to in high school both said a variation of huh, you don’t LOOK gay.

“You’ve only been with guys?” Jess asked gently. 

Sam nodded. He looked back at the ceiling. He heard Dean’s unwelcome voice in his head, advice given after fielding a sideways comment from some waitress: you’re gonna be tempted to think that girls can’t be homophobic, but trust me, they can and will. It’ll get you everywhere.

“Uh, yeah. Guy. Singular. I had a— a boyfriend, in high school.”

It felt insane to reduce Dean to a boyfriend in high school, like he was just some guy in his sophomore history class. A boyfriend who knew every inch of his brain and body like it was his own. A boyfriend who remembered him closing his whole fist around his thumb when he was a toddler.

Jess asked, “Was it serious?”

Like a heart attack, he thought first. Second: so serious it’s illegal. Third: I think about him every moment I’m not thinking about you.

“Yeah,” Sam said. It was easier to keep it straight in his head the closer he kept to the truth. “Yeah, pretty much, yeah. We were together for… you know. A while.”

Mental calculations: if he said they were friends since childhood—the closest parallel to a brother—he couldn’t also say that he moved around a lot, which she already knew. He spun a quick story in his head to keep in the hopper, where he lived for a few years in that dusty highway prairie town where him and Dean first got together, and that’s where he met this unnamed boyfriend and where he lived until grad. He could keep that straight enough.

“That must be hard,” she said, sincere and somehow not at all patronizing. “We don’t give guys a lot of room to do that kind of thing. You’re either gay or you’re straight, right? God forbid you be something else.”

He didn’t know how he got so lucky. He turned on his side towards her and kissed her, not trusting himself and his fractured heart to say much else. It IS hard and you have no idea how hard, you don’t know the half of it. 

He felt her smile against his mouth and he brushed her hair back, jerky and nervous.

“And you’re— that doesn’t—gross you out?”

He’d never tell her the whole of it. Dean said some variation of it a dozen times: You’re gonna keep this inside your whole life. You’re never gonna tell anyone. He never told him he couldn’t tell someone, but they couldn’t imagine ever wanting to—Bobby knowing was bad enough, and he was practically family. He imagined telling Jess and it made his stomach curdle. There wouldn’t be any combination of words that could make someone understand why they did it or what it meant, and even trying would just tarnish it. It would never look the same on the outside as it did from within.

“Of course not,” Jess said, so gentle again. He tried not to think about how she’d maybe be less gentle if she knew. “I’m just glad you… also like girls.”

She said it all slow and sexy and his brain went haywire. He still didn’t know when it was okay to touch her, he didn’t want to overstep, but he was getting hard again. She rolled onto her back and her tits were magnificent, he couldn’t even think.

“Oh God, yeah.” He sounded like an idiot. “Yeah, I— so, so much.” 

He put his hand on her ribs and glanced up at her face like checking is this okay, am I good, and she laughed this wonderful laugh so he kept his hand there. He slid it down her ribs and over her soft stomach, and shuffled down the bed until he could put his face in her neck. 

“If you.” He spat her hair out of his mouth. “If you feel like giving me some, uh, pointers, I promise I’m a quick study.”

He slid his hand down her stomach and lower until it brushed her neat triangle of pubic hair. He felt her tense and tipped his face up to watch hers. She smiled and stretched, wriggling back into her pillow.

“I could be persuaded.”

He kissed his way down her breasts, her stomach. With some minor coaching—breathless yeah, there, like that, both her hands in his hair—he persuaded her, twice. 

 

—

 

He almost regretted joining the soccer team, but he knew if he didn’t do something physical at least a few days a week he’d go crazy, and he wasn’t likely to get any more concussions in soccer. It wasn’t super competitive and he got to run, so he kept at it. 

A few days a week, the team worked out in the weight room, a specific regimen set out by the coach, always at the asscrack of dawn. He was good with early mornings and got ragged on by the guys until he said, “Military dad, we always ran drills and stuff,” and then he got a grudging kind of respect over it; his reputation as Guy With a Bad Childhood had started to extend to the soccer team, between comments like that and a few too many scars in the showers, except they took it as some stupid, masculine badge of honour and not the tragedy his friends thought it was.

He was lifting dumbbells, going through a set of exercises on a mat by the mirrors. He stared at his own reflection to watch for alignment. Working out always reluctantly turned him on, all the sweating and grunting and muscles feeding some base instincts against his will. Like all his pervy shit, he figured it started with Dean, watching him do push ups and crunches when he was old enough to have big arms but Sam wasn’t, ignoring the twisting in his gut that, at twelve, he wrote off as anger. It taught him early on to religiously obey one of the central tenets of being queer in sports: keep your eyes on your own work.

His gaze strayed in the mirror and he accidentally locked eyes with a guy named Kyle on the leg-lift thing a few paces behind him, pale and curly-haired, face like a bird, nearly as tall as him. Kyle all but scowled and turned away.

Sam didn’t like him much, but he was the only one who had picked up on whatever single and ready to mingle beacon he was sending out: in the fall, at a party at one of the guys’ off-campus houses, Kyle sucked his dick in the bathroom, apropos of almost nothing at all, just this weird energy and weird look that Sam picked up on after years of watching Dean’s very similar mating dance.

Kyle didn’t seem to want to talk about it afterwards, and they weren’t friends, far from it. Sam learned later that he had a girlfriend, one he’d been with since high school, so all of it was nothing he was going anywhere near.

He put it out of his head. It was college. He was trying new things. He didn’t know the guy had a girlfriend, that wasn’t his fault. If Kyle wanted to scowl, he could scowl, but he couldn’t out Sam for it without outing himself, and he seemed to care about that way more than Sam did. So the whole thing was fine, it just left a bad taste in his mouth.

The weight room was always over-air-conditioned, it was like a meat locker sometimes. He could see Kyle’s breath clouding in the air. 

 

—

 

He showered and hurried, still dripping, to his first lecture of the day. Nearly the end of his second semester and he still didn’t know his way around because he’d never had to learn a place before, there was nothing much to learn in any of the shitty towns they lived in. Stanford was massive and labyrinthian and he had a good sense of direction, but he still floundered. He’d gotten a habit of showing up to lectures late and sitting in the back, which wasn’t what he wanted, but he cut himself some slack.

He burst out of the doors into the bright courtyard, full of late kids hurrying just like he was, except for one dark, solitary figure standing several yards away.

Sam recognized the shape of him, the sheer concept of him, before he actually saw his face.

It was Dean, facing mostly away, wearing a dark blue suit with a dark blue shirt and shiny shoes. Sam stopped in his tracks like he’d hit a wall.

Dean looked stupid in a suit. Dean wore fed suits because their dad wore fed suits, but John Winchester in a suit looked like a grizzled old detective and Dean Winchester in a suit looked like a bright-eyed yuppie intern. He was still only twenty-three and it looked like playing dress-up, but he’d been convinced since age nineteen that he looked cool in a suit, all Men in Black, so Sam never had the heart to tell him, even when it bungled a case. So there he was, Dean Winchester in a suit, standing with his hands in his pockets looking up at the big stone arches of Stanford University like some first-year business student with cold feet.

Dean turned a slow circle and Sam watched his eyes wander over the few kids skittering past, and then land, finally, on him.

He wasn’t stroking his own ego, but: Dean lit up when he saw him. It was objective. It was like a light switch being flicked on, his whole face opening up in this smile.

“Thought I might find you here.” The smile widened. “Hiya, Sammy.”

It was like an optical illusion, not only seeing Dean in a university but Dean in his university. Dean of sleeping in back seats and stitching wounds with fishing line, in Stanford of well-lit corridors and book-smell and long California days. Their world of two colliding with the world of billions.

Sam closed the last few yards between them in some spectacularly big strides and stood an arm’s length away, floundering. It was too early in the year for Dean’s freckles to be out in full force. He was clean and clean-shaven, so he’d slept in a motel, but his hair was dry, so he’d showered the night before and not this morning. He didn’t look or smell hung over and he seemed focused enough that he’d already had at least one cup of coffee. It was loud with the sound of voices around them but Sam’s ears were rushing so badly it almost seemed quiet. Dean had a way of doing that to him, which had gotten them in trouble at least a few times.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, way too breathless. Dean was unfazed.

“What, no hello, you animal?”

It was a near Pavlovian response to see Dean and have his mouth flood with spit, like his body knew that seeing Dean meant mouth-stuff. God, he was fucked, and the time apart hadn’t made it better. Why did he ever think it would be better?

When he didn’t say anything, Dean kept talking.

“Who told you you could keep growing? Goddamn.” He put a hand out flat from the crown of his head and smacked into the top of Sam’s forehead. “It’s because you’re eating vegetables and shit now, aren’t you? Fuckin’ California.”

It was all textbook brotherly, and Sam hated that it didn’t matter one bit, because it was all everything now and he was horny just looking at him. He looked so insanely good even in his dumb little suit, sunny and well-rested on a bright spring day.

“What are you doing here?” he asked again, mindless, into Dean’s unflagging smile.

“Well I asked some kids up at the front, hey, where do the biggest nerds and losers hang out in this dump, and they said, oh, Sam Winchester? He’s—”

He fisted his hands in the front of Dean’s jacket, spun him around and walked until his back hit the wall. There was a small alcove in the stone that partially shielded them from view but he didn’t care, he couldn’t think, he just crushed his mouth against Dean’s so hard he heard his head thunk back against the wall.

It was heaven. Dean groaned and put his arms around his shoulders and it was heaven, coffee and shaving cream like every morning with Dean he’d ever had. He kissed the way he was used to, the way he taught Sam, perfect synergy, the sleeves of his suit jacket slippery and cool on his skin. Dean was a piece of home he wanted to put in his mouth and suck on like a hard candy until it coated his tongue—like the smell of the Impala, like powdery gas station danishes, like the two shirts of Dean’s that he stole before he left. Being around him again felt like how he imagined people with childhood homes would feel standing at the foot of their front walk after years away.

Sam broke the kiss and dragged his fingers up Dean’s cheek, as if checking that he were solid and real. He half wished he had holy water, iron, something, but he was trying to stop being that kind of paranoid.

“Goddamn,” Dean mumbled against his mouth, laughing, all teeth. “Thought that would take way longer.”

That was Dean. No one else could sound like that. He felt it in his spine.

“What the fuck, man? You can’t use a phone?”

“Where’s the fun in that?” Dean laughed again. One of his hands came up and combed through Sam’s wet hair. “Holy shit, did I miss you.”

He kissed him again, a deep, voracious kiss like coming back from war, Dean’s rough hands on his face hauling him in, letting Sam suck his tongue and crush him up against the wall. It wasn’t like they were estranged; they’d talked on the phone two weeks ago about nothing in particular, catching up, and a few weeks before that, he called Dean late when he couldn’t sleep and they jerked off together—Dean went out to the car to be alone and Sam could hear the occasional squeak of the leather seats as he shifted, over his embarrassing breathy dirty talk, and worse, encouragement, because he knew Sam wasn’t close enough to shut him up—but he hadn’t seen him in the flesh since he dropped him at that bus station, and he hadn’t let himself think much about what he was missing.

Annoying logistics crept into Sam’s periphery: being seen kissing a guy was something he could live with, he already decided, but if anyone he knew saw them, Dean would have to permanently be his boyfriend, not his brother, which meant he either couldn’t have a brother or had to invent a fake name for said brother, and that person could never actually meet the brother. None of it was likely to come up, but it made his head hurt anyways.

“Okay, okay,” he panted, pushing himself back. He ran a hand over his mouth and looked around; it was far enough past the hour that the rush between classes was over and there weren’t many people around. Only a few heads were turned towards them. He smoothed down the front of Dean’s jacket where he’d wrinkled it with his hands. “Sorry, just—”

“You know you can’t hide a boner in slacks, bitch, you’re doing this on purpose.”

“What are you doing here?” he tried for a third time, ignoring Dean’s shifty attempts to hide his hard-on. 

“A case. Your gym’s haunted.”

A case. So Dean wasn’t here to see him. Obviously he wasn’t, why would he be wearing a suit if he were here to see him? But—it was Stanford. And Dean wasn’t here to see him?

“What?” Eloquent.

“Your gym,” Dean said slowly, remedial, “is haunted. The gym here, like the weight room. You couldn’t tell?”

The air-con always being on the fritz. He was an idiot.

“No.”

“I thought you were a walking EMF. Is all that book-learning pushing the bump-in-the-night outta your head?” He looked Sam over, subtle as a sledgehammer. “You’ve clearly been in the gym. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

“Wait. Can we get coffee or something?” Sam said suddenly. “I—I can’t believe you’re here. My brain’s on fire.”

Dean shrugged. “Sure, lead the way.”

“Not now, I’ve got a lecture.”

“So? Skip it.”

Another juvenile knee-jerk: he could see himself letting his carefully-cultivated life go totally off the rails at Dean’s sudden appearance. Skip all his lectures, skip practice, bail on friends, hole up with him in his stuffy little dorm room and fuck each other’s brains out like they were in the pay-by-the-hour motels of their youth, waste his hard-earned money on greasy takeout and hunt some motherfucking ghosts with his big brother, all while being hopelessly, unapologetically in love, the way he was before he had anything else to think about.

“I don’t do that anymore,” he said instead, not unkindly and only meaning part of it.

He watched Dean’s jaw tick in silence for a moment, and waited for a tirade that didn’t come.

“Coffee, then,” Dean said, audibly resigned. “Gimme the where and when.”

Sam wondered if he had a similar conversation with himself in his head. Maybe they were both growing up. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

 

—

 

In between his first two lectures, he grabbed two newspapers, regular and campus, which he otherwise tried to avoid. Instead of taking notes in his second lecture, he pored over both and found it: last week, a guy had died on campus, football star, the whole nine yards. He had no idea how he missed that, he was in that weight room, was the guy killed in the weight room? Had they even closed it? How far up his own ass did he have to be not to notice? The article was about a memorial being held for him, not the murder (murder?) itself, so he’d have to wait until he saw Dean to learn any more. 

All he did in that lecture, after he was done with the papers, was think about Dean. He ran his fingers absently over his mouth, wondered if he would still be in that suit when he saw him. He counted down the minutes like some lovestruck kid and pretended he was just excited about the case. His idle hand wanted to doodle hearts in his margins and he didn’t let it.

When he was free, he all but ran to the coffee shop he’d told Dean to meet him at and half expected him to bail; coffee shops weren’t Dean’s thing for anything but takeout, and campus coffee shops with their try-hard coolness were miles outside his thing. But he fast-walked around that last corner and saw Dean awkwardly lingering outside the coffee shop doors in a tight black t-shirt and black denim jacket, and he didn’t know why he was ever worried.

“Hey!” Too eager, take it down a couple notches. It was only Dean. “You found it.”

Dean wasn’t smiling, but also not not smiling. He didn’t know what to make of it. Tense? “Not too hard.”

Sam nodded his head towards the door and pushed it open. He thought he could feel the phantom touch of Dean’s hand on his lower back, automatic as he stepped through the door, but he couldn’t tell if it was actually there, or almost there and snatched back, or if he was imagining the whole thing out of habit. 

They ordered at the counter and Dean accidentally got something that Sam knew wasn’t what he wanted, but he chose not to correct him. Dean paid for them both and griped about the price. They stood waiting at the other end of the counter, both with their hands shoved into their respective pockets with matching hunches.

“I hate this, by the way,” Dean said conversationally, almost cheery. “Meeting for fuckin’ coffee. In case you thought I don’t, I do.”

Sam bumped their shoulders together. “No greasy spoons or gas stations on campus, sorry.”

“Knew this place would suck.”

He said that, but he kept looking around with a bemused sort of interest like he was in a museum, so it did something for him, however small.

They got their little coffees and Dean scowled down at his as he followed Sam to a table in the corner. The one wall was all window and a slice of sun bisected Dean’s chest and face when he sat down, summer personified. He kept his jacket on and some squirmy part of Sam willed him to take it off; maybe he’d been down south and his arms would be tan. Maybe he’d been working out more and they’d be bigger. He didn’t take off the jacket. The sun glinted off his amulet, and he crossed his arms.

“So, what, you’ve got classes all day?”

“Pretty much.”

“‘Til five, or like, all day all day?”

“Sometimes after five. Last one ends at six today.”

“And you’ve got a job after that?”

“Only weekends.”

“Christ. What do you need a job for? I’ll give you money.”

“I want—” Honest money, he almost said. “—my own money. The scholarship’s a handout, but I earned it. I can at least make my own money, for like, jeans.”

Dean frowned at him for a moment, then shrugged. “I guess I get that.”

His arms were still crossed, slumped petulant in his seat. Sam wanted to beg him to loosen up. Hadn’t they kissed this morning? Where was that cocky smile and the hands in his hair, was he dreaming?

“What’s up with the case?” he tried. “I saw in the paper, the football guy who died?”

“That’s the one. You know much about it, or just read it in the paper?”

“Just the paper.”

“The paper today?”

Sam scowled down at his coffee. “You know how you can’t actually read a newspaper anymore, you just scan it for gory keywords like a word search?”

It was a rhetorical question because Dean had never read a newspaper any other way, except for maybe the funnies.

“Yeah?”

“I wanna be able to read a newspaper normally someday.”

Dean squinted at him again. Sam didn’t like that squint. It was new, like he was looking for something that wasn’t there anymore.

He didn’t say anything, so Sam said, “Just tell me about it.”

The squint went away. Dean sighed.

“Okay, so. Joshua Bradstone was found dead in the weight room last week, of a heart attack. Twenty years old, football beefcake, built like a brick shithouse. Not the type of guy you see having a heart attack.”

“Medical records…”

“Clean as a whistle, no history of anything. I checked around this morning, no signs of forced entry or weird shit in the weight room, except the EMF goes crazy. So I do some digging on the kid, and it turns out he’s got a note on his file around domestic abuse.”

“At twenty.”

“I know right? Scum of the earth. So, I look into that, and the girlfriend who called the cops on him is in one of the sororities here, kappa whatever whatever. The one that’s big on cheerleading. I went to talk to the chick, and she said some stuff, but I couldn’t find an excuse to prowl the sorority for any witchy shit.”

“You,” Sam interrupted, “couldn’t think of a way to get into an all-cheerleader sorority?”

“I’m on duty, Sammy, get your head out of the gutter.” It sounded stilted. Sam didn’t push him. “And anyways, the EMF means we’re dealing with a spirit or something, so whatever. So after, I hit up the library to look into any other deaths, and wouldn’t you know it, a few jocks turn up dead somewhere on campus, every five-ish years, dating back twenty years.”

Sam was leaning forward now. “At which point…?”

Dean leaned in to meet him.

“A girl was found dead there in ‘82, crushed under a giant bench press weight. It was ruled an accident, but her boyfriend’s prints were all over the barbell, they just couldn’t prove anything ‘cause he was a jock, so his prints were all over everything. And looking at that more, the boyfriend from ‘82 was apparently also a real dick—I made some house calls, and none of his old friends or hers had anything nice to say about the guy. Girl was the head cheerleader, like, an Olympic-quality athlete and top sorority sister or whatever you call that, and her boy was a total dirtbag. They figure they got in a fight and he crushed her.”

The table they were sitting at wasn’t big, so with both of them leaning in like they were swapping ghost stories by flashlight, their faces were only a few feet apart. Dean’s hair was honey-gold in the sun, his mouth luscious pink.

Sam said, “So, you think this head cheerleader from the eighties is responsible for the deaths now? Killing guys who step out?”

“Bingo.”

They both went quiet. He watched Dean notice how close they were, but he didn’t sit back. It was so strange to be around him and keeping it so PG. Sam hadn’t been counting, but they must have had sex hundreds of times through the spring and summer before he left, banging elbows and knees in the back seat, bent over counters and tables, clutching wet sinks in gas station bathrooms or spread out on motel beds that felt luxurious in comparison to the rest. It made his mouth dry just to think about it.

They spent most of last summer in Texas, sticky, sunburnt and permanently horny. John was gone for long stretches after the blow-out when Sam told him he was leaving at the end of August, and all they did in his absence was fuck—whenever they were sad, angry or tired, or else happy, dopey and lazy, someone was on their knees. They walked everywhere barefoot until the soles of their feet were hard and black, they drove each other crazy making a show of sucking on dripping popsicles, Sam came on Dean’s face in the change room of an outdoor pool, Dean gave him a handjob in the back of a bus to Dallas. It was the best and worst they’d ever been.

To be sitting across a table from Dean now, clothed, sober and temperature-controlled, made their whole thing feel like a dream. They had a feral summer like a debauched Lord of the Flies, and now they were in a coffee shop in Palo Alto sipping tiny espressos. He couldn’t tell if the tightness in his gut meant he missed that old life, or if he was just Pavlovian-horny from seeing him again.

Would you let me come on your face in the bathroom? Are we supposed to be mature about this now? Is that what I signed up for?

It had been eight months, and he kissed Dean earlier, he didn’t give him much of a chance to say no. For all he knew, Dean thought things through in their time apart and wasn’t into it anymore, despite the phone calls, and Sam didn’t want to jeopardize whatever brotherhood was left by pushing it.

So, he’d play it cool. He’d be respectful. He’d talk about ghosts.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.

Dean sat back. “Uh, break into the sorority with me, genius?”

“Why?”

“To burn the old dead girl’s shit! They have it up on display. Do you even listen when I talk anymore, or just nod and wait for me to take my pants off?”

Sam’s ears got hot. “I didn’t—”

“You were a million miles away, pull up.” Dean was smiling and he hated it. “And I didn’t ask for your help, anyways, or I don’t need it. You’ve probably got some pop quiz or some shit to study for.”

“You can’t study for a pop quiz, they’re a surprise. Hence the pop. What did you think the pop meant?”

“Oh, blow me, poindexter, you know what I mean. You coming or not?”

He had a paper to work on. It was his last free night before he spent the next three working until midnight at the earliest. His room was a mess. Being around Dean made him stupid, young and ugly, and burning for a nostalgia he signed away when he got on a bus.

Dean broke into his reverie before he could answer, rocking forward again with this awful smile on his face.

“Speaking of blow me. College make you slutty yet?”

So much for talking about ghosts. Sam looked out the window. “Fuck off.”

“If you don’t tell me, I’m just gonna assume you’ve gone like, full village bicycle. Running train on every sorority on campus. Maybe that’s why you don’t wanna come, you burned too many bridges at this one.”

“Dean.”

“Or, maybe you stick to frats?”

Dean’s shit-eating grin said he really didn’t care who or what Sam was fucking beyond making fun of him for it—was maybe even a little relieved, based on their conversations before he left—and it knocked loose some of the tension Sam couldn’t help but hold. It was good to know that Dean’s possessiveness had its blind spots. They had so much shit going on between them, any real jealousy would have been a step too far.

Or, maybe it just meant they weren’t there anymore. He didn’t know how he felt about that.

“Bit of both,” Sam said easily, like it hadn’t taken all his gumption and willpower to do anything, at first. Dean’s face was worth it.

“You don’t say.”

He said it all teasing and interested and Sam held his breath. Dean could just look at him and make him tingle. It was worthless and dangerous and maybe the only thing that ever made him think of the word erotic, the way Dean looked at him. It was a big word, and Dean was rarely erotic because erotic implied some amount of finesse or subtlety, and Dean didn’t have either of those, but when he hadn’t opened his stupid mouth, he had no choice but to be subtle. And thus erotic.

“Sam?”

Sam was staring at his mouth. His eyes snapped up.

“What?”

“D’you wanna come?” Dean said.

Do you wanna make me come? Sam thought.

A colour at the counter caught his eye, a wall of blonde, and when he dragged his eyes off Dean’s he found Jess, Stanford hoodie and black tights, waiting for her drink at the end of the counter. She was looking right at him and had been for a while, by the looks of it.

When their eyes met, she smiled and waved at him and he shot back in his seat so fast it almost rocked backwards. Dean turned around when he saw Sam looking at someone, and then Jess was looking at Dean and Dean was looking at Jess and Sam broke out in a nervous sweat.

Jess came over, because that was a normal thing to do when you bumped into a friend and/or a friend you’d slept with. He couldn’t fault her for that. She was standing with another friend of theirs, Justin, who gave a little nod and stayed by the counter a few paces away.

“Hey!” Jess said. She put her hand on his shoulder and squeezed and he watched Dean notice it. He couldn’t decide whether it was dorky to stand up or rude to stay sitting, but Dean didn’t move, so he didn’t either. “How’s it going?”

“Good!” His voice was always two octaves too high around her. “Good, just, just coffee. With…”

He looked at Dean, who was clearly enjoying the hell out of this and refused to help.

His brain went a million miles a second. If he introduced Dean as his boyfriend, he couldn’t be his brother. If he was his brother, he couldn’t be his boyfriend. The two could never publicly coexist for anyone. Boyfriend? Brother? Boyfriend? Brother? Had he ever said Dean’s name to anyone? If he had, which did he say he was? 

“This is Dean,” he said, buying himself a few cool seconds and hoping she might fill in the gaps in his memory. Right, your brother! Or, ohhhh, THE Dean.

Jess turned to Dean and said, “Hi! I’m Jess.”

He watched them shake hands, worlds colliding again. He watched Dean sneak a glance at her tits. Jess looked from him to Dean and back, waiting for either of them to say how they knew each other because that’s what you did when you introduced someone, and Sam met Dean’s eyes—so much like his own if you thought to look, but he couldn’t let that decide for him—and Dean just waited, curious of his answer as much as Jess was.

“My brother,” Sam said finally, way too slow to be normal. But it wasn’t normal to never mention that you had a brother after being friends with someone for nearly six months, not really. That’s what the pause would sound like it was about. He could write it off easily.

He couldn’t decipher the look on Dean’s face. Jess was just surprised.

“Oh! I didn’t know you had a brother, wow.” She looked back at Dean. “Nice to meet you. Sam doesn’t tell us anything.”

“Yeah, he’ll do that,” Dean said, way too charming. Sam nearly kicked him under the table. “He was raised in a cave and he’s still learning to be a real boy.”

Sam kicked him under the table. Jess didn’t notice.

“Does this mean you’re not coming to study group? Justin can’t make it,” she said to Sam, gesturing back at the guy, “but I can be there if you are. No pressure if you’re busy.”

“No! No, I’ll be there, it’s cool. Two, right? Dean’s, uh, busy. ‘Til later.” He caught Justin’s eye and waved. “Hey Justin. Thanks for the notes.”

Justin waved back. Dean turned around to look at him and cocked his head to the side.

“Which of these hot people do you not have dibs on?”

Sam reached across the table and punched him in the arm. “Don’t fuck my friends, dirtbag!”

“Not making any promises, killjoy.”

Jess, God bless her, laughed.

“I’ll leave you alone. See you at two?”

Sam waved stiffly. “Yeah! Two! Great! Sorry about him! Thanks! Bye!”

Jess went back to Justin, who had their coffees, and the two of them left, Jess giving Sam a long, lingering glance as she left that he prayed Dean wouldn’t mention. Dean was too busy slurping his coffee loudly and waggling his eyebrows at him.

Sam hissed, “How are you exactly as annoying around my friends as you were when you were sixteen?”

“Practice makes perfect.” He set his tiny coffee down and fixed the empty cup with one last disdainful look. “So, are you in? It’s gotta be tonight, it’s never just one guy who dies, so people are still at risk. And you know things get hairy when you close in on whatever’s keeping a spirit here.”

School. Work. Jess. Dean. It felt like backsliding. He thought about falling asleep with Dean’s smile pressed to the back of his shoulder. Dean looking up at him with come in his eyelashes. He couldn’t make impartial decisions anymore, if he ever could.

“I’ll be there.”

 

—

 

He hoped Jess wouldn’t bring it up, but the second he walked into her corner of the library just before two, she beamed up at him and said, “You have a brother!”

He tried not to wince. “I am so sorry about him. He’s always like that.”

He put his bag down and sat next to her. They weren’t in ‘kissing hello’ territory yet, but their elbows touched and she kept hers there. 

“It’s okay! He’s funny. I can’t believe you never mentioned him. He’s just visiting?”

“Yeah, just around for the weekend.”

“Nice. To see you? You should’ve said, we could’ve gotten a group together and done something cool.”

“No, he’s, uh— for work. Mostly.”

“Ah, got it. But he’s staying with you?”

God, he hadn’t even thought about that. Where was Dean staying? “Nah, he’s got a hotel somewhere.”

“Cool.” Jess nodded down at her notebook. Sam opened his mouth to change the subject when she asked, “Who’s older?”

He realized he’d told her so little about his family life, it shouldn’t have been surprising that she was asking after this new thing. It was sweet. She liked him, for whatever reason, and he still couldn’t fathom that because no one had ever wanted to know much about him before now, except for Dean, who already knew it all.

“Him. You couldn’t tell?”

“Not really. How much older?”

“Four and a half years.”

She raised her eyebrows, which surprised him: in his head, Dean had looked thirty since he was eighteen, biceps and scars and stubble. The thought that he looked young for his age to other people was… troubling.

Jess said, “No offense, but he looks like a model.”

He felt sharp, instant pride, then shame over that pride. He pulled his books out of his bag and started meticulously spreading them out in front of him.

“Don’t tell him that, he’s touchy about it.”

“About being hot?”

“About his whole—” He gestured at his face. “His whole thing he’s got going on. He thinks he looks girly.”

“I guess I get that. Not girly girly, but he’s… pretty.”

“Very,” Sam agreed, and Jess laughed, which was good. It was funny for a guy to call his own brother pretty, funny ha-ha. As if anyone, gender and blood aside, could look at Dean and not think he looked crazy, fucked-up, double-take run-into-something beautiful. He’d seen guys get mad about it. Dean was an affront to most senses.

Jess said, “I promise I’ll shut my mouth in about five seconds, and this is for sure none of my business, but—is he gay? Unrelated to his face, I just mean the leering at Justin. And at me.”

Sam laughed before he could stop himself.

“It’s cool. I don’t think he really knows,” he said, honestly. “But something like that, yeah.”

He watched her think about it. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

She said, “Same as you, then.”

It was too close for comfort. Guilt hit him like a ton of bricks the way it did every time they bumped into one of the walls he put up around his lies. What a coincidence that me and my brother—who I definitely haven’t had sex with, by the way, no reason to bring that up at all—both like guys.

He tried for levity. “Yup. Weird, right? Must have been something in the water growing up.”

“Does your dad know?”

“Oh, shit no. He’d destroy us.”

He said it so easily, but he watched her face crumple and realized how that would sound to anyone who was raised in a loving home.

“It’s fine,” he added, before she could say anything. “He never did anything, it’s, you know, he’s just like that. Old fashioned. A ‘man’s man’ type of asshole. He just… he just doesn’t need to know.”

“So he never met your boyfriend?”

He raised him, actually.

“No,” he lied. “I kept all that stuff quiet. Just easier that way.”

“But, your brother knew him?”

That was the worst kind of lie, he felt, the point blank ones. He usually got to avoid them because people rarely asked hey, are ghosts real? But this was a black, gun to the temple lie. He was inventing a fake boyfriend. He dreaded that maybe someday he’d have to give him a fake name.

“Yeah, he met him.” A pen, he needed a pen, he dug around in his backpack. “Anyways, I know I said we could maybe do something tonight, but I didn’t know Dean would be here. So it’ll have to be another day. Sorry, you know I don’t normally bail.”

Jess had a smile he didn’t deserve. He couldn’t believe he got to be her friend and they’d had sex, that didn’t happen to him, not with a girl like her.

“I know! It’s all good.” She put her hand on his arm. He could smell her hair again. He felt her trace the swell of his bicep with her thumb and it made him woozy. “It’s nice that you get to see your brother. What are you gonna get up to?”

Breaking and entering, destruction of private property, probably not grave robbing because it sounds like she was cremated, and maybe public indecency if I’m stupid enough. 

“Probably just grab food and hang out in my room.”

 

—

 

He tried to keep busy waiting for it to be late enough to meet up with Dean, middle of the night late. He dug through the few possessions in his closet for the leather boots he used to wear on hunts, not dissimilar to Dean’s, ever since he got a nail through his left foot while wearing sneakers once. He couldn’t remember the last time he wore the boots and could only hope he hadn’t gone up a shoe size.

The night was cool enough in early April and he wore a forest green hoodie, not thick, and jeans. He’d told Dean the name of his dorm and shoved a campus map into his stubborn hands before they parted ways earlier, and sure enough, when he hit the tree-lined street, he heard a car horn and found Dean parked down the block, leaning on the driver’s side with his arm stuck through the open window. 

Before he could get out a hi, Dean said, “How the hell does anyone find parking around here? Are you just late for shit all the time?”

“People bike.”

Dean made a face that said exactly what he thought about that. “Do you bike?”

“I walk.”

He seemed to respect that a little more. He went to open the car door and Sam said, “We’re driving? The place isn’t far, I looked it up.”

Dean got in and pointed at the empty passenger seat.

“You walk on your own time. We drive.”

Sam rolled his eyes, but as he walked around the hood, the engine roared to life, and his heart did a thing he didn’t have words for. Like what he imagined it might be like to hear his mother’s voice.

He swung into the car and slammed the door and—

“Is this Johnny Cash?”

Dean was looking over his shoulder with his arm over the back of the seat as he reversed, and Sam could make his face out in the dark, shadows sharp over his cheeks, under the bow of his lip. He was frowning. 

Dean listened to Johnny Cash when he moved away from his only almost-girlfriend in high school. He listened to him the final week before Sam left. If not Cash, then some other country bluesy guys Sam couldn’t name.

He kept watching Dean as he drove down the lane, and his face said he wasn’t going to answer. He settled back in his seat. 

“You know where you’re going?”

“Uh-huh.”

Dean tapped his fingers on the wheel. The streets and sidewalks through campus were deserted so late at night and Johnny Cash’s bassy drawl made everything feel intimate.

Sam said, “There’s a big party in one of the dorms tonight, and I know a guy dating a girl at the house we’re breaking into, so I mentioned it to him and told him to take her. And she’ll probably take friends. To try to get the house emptier.”

“Smart.”

“Won’t be everyone, but.”

“Still. Good.”

He looked over at him again. Dean looked at home behind a wheel in a way he didn’t look anywhere else. When Sam pictured the Impala, Dean was driving it, no matter how long it had been John’s; John, he saw from the back seat, but if Dean was driving, Sam was next to him. The urge to reach across the seat back and put his hand on his nape was bordering on painful. He shoved his fists into his hoodie pocket.

“Where’s Dad?” he asked. Dean shrugged.

“After a rugaru in New Mexico.”

Sam waited for a ‘he says hey.’ It didn’t come.

“He knows you’re here?”

“He knows I’m in the Bay Area. You were implied.”

Sam didn’t expect much else, but he still felt like a secret more than ever, almost as bad as rucking up the sheets on a second, unused motel bed in the morning so it wouldn’t look like they shared, furiously scrubbing in the shower so he didn’t smell like sex. It was crazy to think that part of his life was over. It had to be.

“When do you have to go back?” he asked.

“Whenever,” Dean said, the jackass, but again, Sam let up. It felt like being in a maze, bumping into these dead ends. Dean’s fingers kept drumming on the wheel. “So, you’re good? You got friends and stuff, it looks like?”

“I think so, yeah.”

“Is that weird?” This didn’t strike Sam as a weird thing to ask because Dean didn’t have friends and Sam barely ever had friends, it was a genuine question. Is it weird to know people? “This is a rich kid school. Are they freaks or what?”

Sam looked out the window to hide his smile. His heart warmed. 

“No, but they’re definitely rich. Everyone. Even the people who don’t think they are.”

“Not hard to be richer than living in your car.”

“I don’t even mean rich compared to us, I mean like, real rich. One time I heard someone say, ‘We only have someone come in to clean once a week.’ Like that’s a concession.”

“Must be a lotta jerks.”

“They’re not all bad.” Jess’ parents were both dentists. She was more self-aware than most, but like most people, she didn’t know what it meant to go hungry or be really, actually cold. He couldn’t fault her for it. Because Dean wasn’t looking for an empathetic moment, he added, “Some are, though. Like absolute space cadets.”

He expected a laugh, but Dean was just quiet.

“Is that rough?” he asked after a second. “Do people notice…”

“That I was raised on pepperoni sticks and petty theft?”

“Yeah.”

Sam shrugged. “I mean, yeah. Kind of. I don’t know the right stuff. The cultural touchpoints. Movies, I kind of get, but everything else is a wash. It’s not a big deal, but yeah, people notice.”

Dean sighed. “Kids are brutal.”

“They’re not kids, they’re like, nineteen. I’m not a—”

Now, he laughed. Sam let it go again.

He twisted his hands inside his pocket. At some point, things got weird. This was his brother, his person, why were things so stilted? Was it something he said? How was he supposed to fix it? Had eight months apart really made that much of a difference after a lifetime shoulder-to-shoulder? 

Talking about John and being poor sure wasn’t going to help. He shifted into Known Dean Territory, something to break the ice, as they turned down another street of campus housing.

“It’s been weird trying to, uh, flirt or whatever, though. Pick people up. I never really did that before.”

He looked ahead as he said it, but he saw Dean’s face swivel towards his instantly. They fought less than they ever had last summer despite the mounting horror of Sam leaving, and he figured it was because they got to fuck their problems out; sex smoothed out tension when they were both so hard-headed and bad at talking. Sex was a fight that brought them together instead of apart, and even talking about it was a step in the right direction, whether they actually did it or not.

Dean spoke carefully, like picking his way through landmines.

“Yeah? You… had much luck?”

“It’s the last one here,” Sam said, pointing through the windshield at a creamsicle-orange two-storey house down at the end of the lane. “And, uh. One of the guys on the soccer team blew me at a party, if that counts.”

Dean laughed like a bark, a thunderclap. He pulled up a few spots away from the house, yanked the car into park and thumped Sam on the shoulder hard.

“Sam! Goddamn.” Another thump. Boyish. “I didn’t think little Sammy Winchester had it in him.”

He sounded genuinely pleased. Sam shook his hand off and tried not to smile. Dean made no move to get out, so neither did he.

“Shut up, it wasn’t a thing.”

“House party sloppy is never a thing, that’s the beauty of it. Might as well be a glory hole. Was he any good?”

Kyle had been messy but enthusiastic. Sam wasn’t sure if he’d ever done it before and there was something hot about that. He choked on it and didn’t swallow. 

“He was fine,” Sam said.

“Better than me?”

It wasn’t hard to spot the slippery slope. He slid anyways.

“You’re asking me if a drunk, teenaged jock gave better head than— what’s that thing you call yourself, the—”

“The blowjob boy-queen of Lawrence, Kansas.”

“—than the self-appointed blowjob boy-queen of Lawrence, Kansas?”

“Watch it, self-appointed, there was a rigorous—”

“Well, no,” Sam said, looking down at his hands. “He didn’t.”

Dean beamed at him. “Didn’t think so.”

“Quit fishing for compliments, boy-queen.”

Dean didn’t need to fish for compliments, he knew what he was. Sam was getting riled up just thinking about it. He’d gotten Dean’s mouth on him more than any mortal soul deserved. More than anyone else ever had, he realized, which made him all sweaty to think about.

Dean mistook his silence for shame.

“Hey, world-class or not, you’re gettin’ your dick wet.” He reached into the space between them and squeezed the back of Sam’s neck. “That’s my boy.”

Sam suppressed a shudder. That had no right turning him on, his brain was broken.

Dean withdrew his hand, no lingering, but he didn’t get out of the car. For a long second he didn’t say anything and Sam looked at him, dark except for the light of a campus-safety-quality street lamp past the sorority house in question. It was new and unexpected to have him here, but having some weird conversation with him while sitting in a parked car was still second nature, it felt organic.

“What about girls?” Dean asked. Sam hunched up.

“What’s with the twenty questions?”

“I’m going somewhere with it. And two questions isn’t twenty, you cagey bitch, I haven’t seen you in months. You don’t talk about this shit on the phone.” He leaned back against the door a little. He raised his eyebrows. “So. Girls?”

His disapproval and horniness sounded similar, weirdly enough, both low and slow. It was usually clear enough from context which he meant, but this conversation was so tangled up and so probably both disapproving and horny that Sam was stumped. Dean wanted him to sleep around, he’d said so. It was healthy or whatever, and he sounded so happy about the blowjob. Clearly, this was the same thing.

Sam said, “Just one girl, so far.” He decided to go for it. “Uh, Jess, actually, from the coffee shop.”

Dean’s eyebrows went way, way up.

“You lost your girlginity to her? The perfect ten who looks like the chick from Splash?”

Even within the context of being mostly-exes, pissing Dean off, as his brother, was always delicious. Inspiring jealousy was even better.

“Yup.”

“Goddamn, I hate you. I told you you’d—”

“It’s not like that, with her. I mean— I know she’s hot, but I dunno, I like her. She’s cool. You’d like her.”

“You like her?”

His tone felt like a trap. He didn’t know how to not walk into it.

“Yeah. I think so. Why?”

Dean sucked his teeth and looked away. He hooked his fingers through the bottom of the steering wheel.

“Not to tell you your business, but that was a real tonguey kiss this morning for a guy with a girlfriend. And before you say it, I know I’m no angel, but it’s a bad habit.”

“No no no,” Sam said quickly. “It’s not like that. We haven’t had that conversation. Yet. We’re friends. The other part’s just new.”

He wasn’t lying. Dean’s eyes narrowed.

“Okay.”

“I wouldn’t do that. There’s no, uh… no toes to be stepped on. If that’s— oh. That’s what you were getting at.”

“Yeah.”

Dean’s eyes were nearly black in the dark, wide and still and serious. Dean was grilling him because he was making sure he was single. Because he— he—

Sam knew he could shove his way across the bench seat and kiss him, right now. He could wrench him in by his jacket, kiss him until he couldn’t breathe and pull him into his lap so they could rut against each other until they felt normal again, until he had marks from Dean’s mouth and hands all over him the way he was supposed to.

It wasn’t time. Maybe Dean was just making sure he held up his end of their agreement, that he would try. Maybe they were parked outside of a sorority they were about to break into and rob, Jesus. He fumbled with his seatbelt.

“We should—”

“Ghosts,” Dean choked out.

“Ghosts.”

“Right. Okay. Ghosts.”

Dean practically scrambled out of the car. Sam sat for a moment after he slammed the door and took a few deep breaths, grounding, waiting. He could wait. They’d figure it out.

He met Dean at the trunk and leaned against the side of the car as he rooted around for supplies. The trees that lined the narrow campus street were fluorescent green with new growth and seemed to shine in the dark. The air smelled as sweet and clean as it got in those parts, which was still galaxies away from wide open Midwest fields. The house in question loomed down the street and its windows were blessedly dark.

“It’s her uniform, you said?”

“You got it,” Dean said from within the trunk. “Saw it when I was in there, there’s a—I’m gonna go with a shrine, in the living room. Real culty sorority shit. The girl pointed out which stuff was the dead girl’s.”

“Cool. So we cat-burglar in, take her stuff and burn it someplace else?”

“Unless you wanna add arson to the list. I’m talking a minute inside, tops.” He handed Sam a small fabric bag. “This is salt. Throw it if she shows up. Not as badass as a shotgun, I know, but it’s a B&E and you go to school here, we don’t need to be shooting shit.”

Sam nodded and pocketed the bag. He couldn’t remember the last time him and Dean did a hunt alone together; if Sam went along, it was because John needed a third body for something, a distraction or backup or lookout. He wasn’t used to being the right-hand man. 

Dean said, “I’m surprised you’re willing to shit where you eat, by the way. On-campus shenanigans.”

That hadn’t even crossed his mind. In retrospect, it was insanely stupid.

“It’s not a big deal. No one’s gonna know it was us, right? We’ll be good?”

“We’re always good.”

“Besides, I…” Kind of miss it, he was going to say. He stopped himself. “I’ve been bored.”

He looked over. Dean had his lock-pick kit in hand and a small case of other tools, one hand on the trunk.

“I wondered about that,” he said quietly. Sam shrugged.

“I mean, mostly it’s been a huge relief, but yeah, nothing gets as exciting as ghosts and ghouls and vampires, on paper. But I also don’t have to worry about you or Dad turning up dead every night, so that’s worth some boredom.”

Dean slammed the trunk shut. He walked by Sam and shoved the lock pick kit against his chest without looking.

“We don’t stop almost dying just ‘cause you stop worrying about it, but good to know you’re sleeping easier.”

“Dean.”

“Never mind. Come on. You’re better with the lock shit than me.”

God, he’s touchy tonight, Sam thought as he followed him down the sidewalk. Wait. I’m being an asshole.

Even putting their whole thing aside, he realized he was flaunting his new easy life when nothing had changed for Dean. He knew Dean wasn’t jealous, he didn’t want Sam’s life, but he probably didn’t want to hear about it either. Haha, it’s so weird going to one of the most prestigious schools in the country! Isn’t it weird that I have rich friends and sleep in the same safe place every night, play sports and eat properly and don’t get shot at or mauled, AND I get to hang out with a hot girl who listens when I talk and lets me have sex with her? Hey, how many new scars have you gotten since the last time I saw you?

He followed Dean around the side of the house, just shapes in the dark. He tried to think of some way to apologize that wouldn’t get Dean’s hackles up or make him feel like a charity case, but nothing came to him. His heart started to pound with their imminent break-in. He didn’t want to be distracted by guilt.

The house had a porch out back. They crouched to the corner and Dean peered out, then made a couple hand signals, quiet, listen, follow me. He seemed like a different person when he was on anything even resembling a hunt, different physically, in the hard set of his shoulders and his eerie stillness. It was always sort of attractive to see him so purposeful, and he didn’t get to see it often.

He reached out and grabbed Dean’s arm.

“Hey. I’m sorry.”

Dean whipped around with a finger to his lips and mouthed a violent SHUSH! Sam yanked his hand back and raised both, a silent apology. Dean shook his head and jerked towards the door, motioning for him to follow.

They crept up the porch to the back door, locked. Sam started in with the lock pick, his head pounding, but it went easy enough, it was an old lock, and he let Dean creep into the dark, quiet house ahead of him.

 

—

 

Ten minutes later, Sam was laying on a grassy slope on the far side of a sports field, sweaty, out of breath and covered in a fine dusting of shattered glass and drywall dust. He panted up at the sky and his whole body ached.

“I’ll be the first to admit that could’ve gone smoother,” Dean choked out somewhere to his left. Up the slope, he could see his boots pointing skyward in his peripheral vision. “We shoulda gotten masks or something. Pantyhose.”

“I don’t think anyone saw us.”

“There was screaming, someone saw us.”

Sam didn’t say anything. He tried very hard not to think about the repercussions to his academic career if any of the girls who had thundered down the stairs at the cacophony they made in their living room recognized him. He was happier than ever to be a first-year nobody.

Dean asked, “Why’d it go for you?”

The second Dean got the display case open, the spirit appeared, a wispy, decayed, blackened face of a girl with a mane of permed blonde hair in a cheerleading uniform, and dove for him. For a second everything was freezing cold, his vision going gauzy and blank, and she slammed him into a bookshelf; the shelves hurt in stripes of ache against the back of his body and the wall cracked behind him. Dean threw a fistful of salt at her, but not before she chucked him into the display case and shattered it.

Sam could only think of one reason it skipped Dean and went for him. 

“That guy I hooked up with had a girlfriend. I dunno. Maybe that’s enough.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah. He’s an asshole. Whatever.” He levered himself upright. Dean was twisting his arm around to look at a rip in his jacket over his upper left arm. “Are you hurt?”

“It’s nothing. Fell on some glass.” He clicked his tongue. “Shit. I liked this jacket.”

Sam sighed. He started worrying when Dean wasn’t mad about his jackets.

“You can mend it.”

“Eh. You were always better at that homemaker shit than me.”

A long pause. Dean kept sticking his fingers into the tear in his jacket sleeve. It was too dark for Sam to see how bad it was, but there was no wetness glinting in the light.

“You’re okay?”

“It’s nothing,” Dean said again. He groaned and struggled to his feet, and offered Sam the hand that wasn’t clutching the ancient cheerleading uniform. “C’mon, let’s torch it.”

Not sure what else to do with it, they took the uniform out to the middle of the field and burned it, standing around with their hands in their pockets until it was a scorch mark in the pristine grass. Sam watched Dean’s pensive face in the leaping firelight and got tense and nervous like the closing minutes of a date, waiting to be invited up for ‘coffee.’

Dean cleared his throat, still staring down into the embers.

“What now?” 

The question hung in the air. Dean looked at him with a practiced kind of blankness, just waiting. Waiting. Waiting some more. God, he was going to make Sam say it.

“You wanna see my room?” Sam asked, awkward. “I know it’s late, I dunno, maybe you just wanna— I’m not wearing a watch.”

Dean shrugged like it was nothing and Sam wanted to hit him.

“Sure. Gotta drive you home anyways.”

Sam still hadn’t asked where he was staying, but as they drove back across campus, he noticed his duffle in the back seat.

 

—

 

Sam never had a bedroom before, not one he expected to stay in for any length of time and didn’t share with Dean. He felt a twist of little brother nerves as he unlocked his door, a vague kind of he’d better not make fun of my stuff. Not being sure where they stood made him feel more little-brother than ever, all sharp elbows and deference.

As he opened the door, he remembered that he’d forgotten to clean; there were three empty coke cans and two paper coffee cups on his cheap laminate desk desk piled with dog-eared books and notepads, and gym clothes on the floor at the foot of the bed. A ratty Nirvana poster hung over the desk alongside a photo booth strip of him and Jess and two other friends, and a ticket stub from a show he went to. His bed sported the maroon plaid standard-issue dorm comforter, unmade. No tacked up centerfolds or raunchy calendars. He wondered if that was cool or lame.

“So this is you,” Dean said slowly, looking around. Sam shut and locked the door behind him.

“This is me.” He went to the nightstand, flicked on the lamp and saw the alarm clock. “Shit, it’s four AM.”

“All good. I can get out of your hair in a sec here.”

Sam’s heart sunk. He tucked his hair behind his ears, a nervous habit.

“Where are you staying?”

Dean didn’t answer. He hadn’t brought his duffle up. Sam watched him stare for a while at the twin bed. Offering him a place to stay was out of the question until he figured out what was going on with them, not that, if it came to it, Dean hadn’t slept worse places than a bedroom floor. 

“Your feet must hang off that thing,” Dean said to the bed. He was fiddling with his leather bracelets. 

“Yup.” Sam stared at him, he didn’t know how to stop. Dean, in his room, a little beat up and tired. He looked so good. “Lemme see your arm.”

Dean waved a hand at him. Not the hand of his wounded arm, Sam noticed.

“It’s just a scratch.”

“It went through your jacket! We should still clean it, there’s a bathroom down the hall. Let me see.”

Sam stepped in and got a hand on his sleeve. Dean put a hand over his to stop him.

“Sam. I said leave it.”

Neither moved their hand. Sam was looking down at him—the down was starting to get significant now with his extra inch over winter, he never thought he’d see the day—and in the perfect quiet, and the stillness, he saw that he was holding his breath. He didn’t think it was about his arm.

“It’s good to see you,” Sam said quietly. “I don’t think I said that earlier.”

Dean still didn’t move his hand off Sam’s. Sam squeezed his arm a little, and Dean let him.

“You didn’t, but. Glad to hear it.”

He loved Dean’s hands. Even before all this, they felt like home, but maybe thinking that much about your brother’s hands didn’t qualify as ‘before.’ He rubbed his thumb back and forth on Dean’s arm and Dean stared at him with something between awe and dread, and Sam wanted, wanted, wanted.

“What are we doing?” he asked, like he’d wanted to ask all day, every time he looked at Dean and saw him already looking back, when his hands kept finding his shoulders, his back, his arms.

That seemed to break the spell. Dean took his hand off his and stepped back until he hit the bed. He sat down and put his hands awkwardly on his knees, like he needed to keep an eye on them.

“I’m… being your brother. That’s not what you want?”

“You’re the one who said we’re always brothers,” Sam said carefully. “That all the other stuff is secondary.”

That made Dean look down. He went back to picking at his bracelets.

“Sometimes it doesn’t feel secondary.”

“I know.”

Maybe Dean had been going in circles around the same things he had: how much was too much, what he wanted and what was right, each of them too worried about making the wrong move to say anything at all. 

It wasn’t a big room, there was nowhere to go. Sam was standing just in front of him, close enough to reach out and touch. He looked small, sitting hunched on the bed.

“What are you afraid of?” Sam asked, because that’s always what it came down to with Dean, when it was about him. Dean scoffed at him.

“Don’t get all shrinky on me. You always do this.”

“Because you always do this. Come on.” Another step closer, until he could reach out and brush his hand over Dean’s again. “You’re finally here, and it’s been weird all day. What are you so worried about?”

“Quit looming,” Dean snapped, and stood so suddenly Sam fumbled to take a step back. He oozed panic. “It’s weird because I’m trying not to fuck you, Sam! Don’t play dumb. You’ve got a whole life here, it’s not up to me to just—”

“Fine, then it’s up to me! And I—”

“Don’t. Don’t even start.”

“What do you mean, don’t? There’s no not left to do, we did it all already! We’ve done everything twice! Why do you care now?”

“Because you’re out, Sam, I can’t pull you back in.”

“You’re not pulling, I’m going, willingly, I was never out, I—”

He reached out and grabbed Dean’s jacket to have something to do with his hands, to get closer and feel the shape of him. He slid them inside, against his warm chest, his soft shirt. Dean took a shuddering breath. He let Sam touch him but didn’t touch back, his hands hovering empty and polite in the space between them.

He mumbled, “You have a girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend.”

“She’s gonna be. Sam—”

“So, that comes later. Not now.” Sam slid his hands up to his neck and hung on. He pulled until their foreheads bumped together, his heart ratcheting up. “You kissed me this morning.”

“You kissed me, I’m not made of stone.”

Dean’s hands landed finally, finally on his hips, and he sighed and swayed into him, thumping his head down on his shoulder. Sam folded his arms around his shoulders and sighed in turn, so blindingly relieved just to be touching him again, to be where he was supposed to be again after so much time apart. He put his cheek against his head and Dean’s arms slid around him, pulled him closer.

“Give me points for trying,” Dean said, defeated, muffled by Sam’s hoodie. “You didn’t make it easy. Lookin’ at me like a piece of meat.”

“Try being less meaty.”

“Sammy.” Dean ground his head against his shoulder. “This is a bad idea.”

“That’s not new.”

“Sam. C’mon. Think about it.”

Sam nuzzled his hair. The smell of him was so familiar it made his heart ache, closeness and home and brother, and with that, a yawning, insatiable lust. He felt the change in Dean too, his hands starting to move over his back, hips notching forward. Everything else that mattered started to drip away, and in its place was the single-minded arousal that eroded their ‘no touching if Dad’s in the same state’ rule to ‘no touching if he’s looking directly at us’ within the span of that first week they had their hands on each other.

Sam let his voice get soft and wanting.

“I really am just glad to see you. If you wanna stay the night and just go to sleep, that’s cool. Hands off, no pressure. But.” He put his lips right on Dean’s ear and heard him suck in a panicky breath. “I miss you, and you’re driving me nuts, and if you let me, I’ll do anything you want.”

Dean’s hands pressed harder against his back, bunching his hoodie. He turned in towards him and he could feel his breath as he laughed.

“No pressure. Right.”

“I mean it, no hard feelings.”

“Huh.” Dean tilted his face up. His lips brushed Sam’s cheek, feather soft, and Sam didn’t know how he was still standing. He curled his hands around Dean’s shoulders, half for support, half because cracking him open and crawling inside him wasn’t an option. “Anything I want?”

“Anything,” Sam breathed, and he couldn’t take it anymore, he leaned back so he could see him, their faces just inches apart, noses brushing, so close to kissing him his jaw trembled with holding back.

He felt Dean smile more than he saw it.

“I dunno where you’re gonna get a contortionist and a strap-on at four in the morning, but this is Califmrrphh.”

Sam kissed him, crushing and messy, half a word lost in his mouth and Dean tipping backwards with the sheer force of it. Sam unwound his arms from his shoulders to grab at his face, let their lips slide together as Dean coaxed his tongue into his mouth and groaned, softly, hardly a sound at all. It felt like coming home and also like something brand new in this new place in his new life, terrifying and unknown.

He forgot the way Dean would go pliant and sweet for a few seconds when he first kissed him, before he caught himself and remembered to be tough about it; Sam bent him back and Dean let him, folded his arms around his neck and let himself be kissed breathless.

“I was just joking,” he mumbled, already sounding frantic, “it’s not ‘cause you said—”

“I know.”

“You don’t have to—”

“Anything,” Sam insisted, and Dean laughed against his mouth.

He was too far gone to worry about sounding eager. He tore Dean’s jacket off, shoved him onto the bed and pushed his shirt up over his chest, bunched under his arms, and ran over every inch of skin he could reach, watching his hands that suddenly seemed so big on Dean in a way they never had before. He climbed over him, mouth following his hands, kissing his chest, mouthing at a dusky, peaked nipple.

Dean laughed again. “You don’t waste any time.”

“It’s four in the fucking morning,” Sam said into his sternum, like it wasn’t because he was starving for it.

Dean shuffled up the bed to get his head on the pillow and shot up instantly.

Sam grabbed at him. “Don’t—”

He stuck his hand under the pillow despite Sam’s sputtered protests and pulled out a small black pistol, the one he’d given Sam before he left. He beamed up at him.

“I knew you hadn’t changed.”

Sam snatched it away from him. “Watch it, it’s loaded.”

“Obviously. Who keeps an unloaded gun under their pillow?”

Sam set it in his nightstand drawer and kissed him again, avoiding all talk of the gun and hoping it wouldn’t come to Dean finding the box of salt he kept under the bed.

Another minute and Dean was thoroughly distracted. He clawed at Sam’s hoodie until he sat up on his knees over him, pulled it over his head and smoothed his staticky hair down with his hands after. Dean’s hands were on him instantly, pawing at him with the same panicky energy Sam had with him, and staring. He put his hand flat on Sam’s stomach when he tried to lean back in.

“Holy shit, you look good, what have you been doing?”

Sam didn’t think he looked much different, but it was nice of him to say.

“Soccer.”

“Remind me to make fun of you for that later, but—Jesus Christ, where do I send the gift basket, look at you—”

Dean grabbed for his face and ended up pulling him down by the neck into a brutal kiss, licking into his mouth, pushing his hips up into Sam’s until they fell into an unconscious, practiced grind, rough through denim.

“You swear this is okay?” Dean asked. Sam laughed and he smacked him in the back of the head. “I’m serious!”

Sam tore his mouth off his and buried his face in his neck. He pulled at his belt and jeans and Dean lifted his hips to let him pull them off his feet, boxers too, and he felt like there was something nice about how their bodies didn’t forget how to do this even if they did, all the motions still there under their skin.

He didn’t dignify Dean’s nervousness with a response, and Dean seemed to have forgotten about it in favour of pulling at Sam’s jeans, so uncoordinated Sam had to slap his hands away and climb off the bed to step out of them. Dean’s eyes on him were another compliment he didn’t need, a dropped-jaw kind of lust.

“Fuck, I missed you,” Dean blurted, and then, pointing aggressively at Sam’s already-hard dick, “I missed that.”

It was stupid, but it was what finally made Sam go all sappy, as he pulled off his socks and they were naked in front of each other for the first time in a lifetime, again, finally, Dean laying naked in the first bedroom that was ever his, happy and beautiful and hard.

Sam said, “I love you,” at the same time Dean said, “Fuck my face.”

Dean winced. “Ah. Read that look wrong.”

Sam clambered up on the bed and swung a leg over him before he could say anything else, right up by his chest and shoulders so his dick hung obscenely in his face. Dean blinked up at him, his hands coming up to his thighs on reflex.

“Or not,” he added.

His lips were parted, waiting as the head of Sam’s dick skidded wet across his cheek, his upper lip. Sam wrapped his fingers around the base of his cock and fed it to him. He moaned and braced a forearm against the wall over his head, and when Dean moaned in turn he could feel it where his dick was right at the back of his throat, velvet soft.

“Jesus,” Sam breathed, starting to move his hips, feeling Dean’s hands wander up the backs of his thighs and grab at his ass. 

Dean was good at this and Sam forgot that stupid name again, blowjob something, Dean was so dumb, he loved his own jokes more than he ever loved anything else and nothing could change his mind. He curled his tongue around him and let Sam thrust into his mouth and he made it perfect, wet sucking and slurping, not fighting when Sam fisted his short hair to hold him still. Sam couldn’t imagine doing this to a girl because he hadn’t yet and it felt demeaning in a way that was hot with Dean because making his stupid brother choke on his dick was a miracle but making a girl do it would feel bad, but he knew he’d feel different once it happened; it wasn’t like girls couldn’t like it as much as Dean did, and he liked it so much.

The faint sound of Dean jacking himself off behind him almost made him lose it completely. 

“Fuck,” he swore, way too unhinged for the one that was supposed to be in control. “God, Dean—”

Dean moaned again. The hand that wasn’t on his dick slid up Sam’s leg to his ass, fingers all the way in his crack, teasing, and Sam had to slow down. He pulled all the way out—Dean tried to lean up to keep it in his mouth, spit strung from his lips and Sam was a God—and traced the head over his wet lips before pushing back in, pulling all the way out again and watching him chase it with his tongue. 

“I love your stupid mouth,” Sam panted, face tipped down to watch his hips pumping his dick in and out of said mouth again, hard, “you should get it fucking insured, your—fuck—”

He knew he had to stop when he started babbling, that was Dean’s game, that and he could feel his entire body starting to light up, heat and tension flooding everything, so close he had to stop right then or not at all. He leaned back and his dick popped out of Dean’s mouth. Dean had tears in the corners of his eyes and drool on his chin, which Sam would never, on threat of death, admit to liking.

Dean coughed, smiling up at him all toothy.

“Are you as surprised as I am that you’ve never ruptured my windpipe doing that?”

His voice was rough in his used throat. Sam climbed off him to kiss him and taste himself in his mouth before it went away, shoving his tongue down his throat where his dick had been, and Dean just let him, he always let him, which was one of the more insane things about what they were doing; Dean the brother told him no constantly, but Dean the boyfriend didn’t know the fucking meaning of it.

Sam pressed his whole body against his and they both groaned at the feel of it, dizzying physical contact, so much skin, the sticky slide of Sam’s spit-wet dick along Dean’s, trapped between them. Dean still had his shirt up under his arms but neither were willing to pause long enough to take it off and it got Sam kind of hot anyways, reminded him of the sparky panic of fucking in public with their jeans around their thighs, shirts shoved up. 

Sam broke the kiss, too light-headed, and put his face into the hollow under Dean’s jaw, which only at four in the morning was starting to show stubble after his morning shave. He ran his tongue along it, like sandpaper. He slid his hand between them and gave enough space to jerk Dean off tight and slow, his dick thick and heavy and silken in his hand.

Dean made a noise like he wanted to say something, then stopped. He ran his hands up Sam’s sides kind of fluttery.

“So—anything, huh?”

“I thought that didn’t matter,” Sam teased.

“It doesn’t, I just… wanted to run something by you.”

Sam hardly registered him talking, he couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t Dean’s dick in his hand.

“Shoot.” He ran his nose up the cord of muscle in his neck. “Anything that won’t get us arrested or killed, try me.”

Another not-noise, hesitation. He spurred him on, sucked and bit at the soft spot behind his ear that made him squirm. He teased his fingers up over the crown of his dick, which did the same. Part of him expected some big, ill-timed kink reveal, God only knew what with Dean.

“So, uh, first, for context, I haven’t been with any guys since you left.”

Sam went still. “Really?”

“Yeah. Not any reason, just because. Looking for some variety, post-you. Lotta girls.”

“Okay.”

“So it’s, you know, been a while. For me. With a guy.”

“Okay?”

“So I was thinking we could, if you want—” The rest came out as a very fast, very long word. “—do-that-thing-you-like-that-I’m-weird-about.”

It took Sam a second. He reared back.

“You want me to fuck you?”

The first time he fucked Dean, he lasted all of twenty seconds and Dean called him a one-pump chump for weeks. It got a lot less funny once he got better at it. He only got it once in a blue moon, but making Dean fall apart on his dick was exactly as good as he always knew it would be.

Dean twisted away from him, his head turned to the side.

“Don’t make a big production of it.”

“Oh, I’m making a Broadway fucking production of it.” He gave him a sloppy kiss on the cheek and Dean batted at him halfheartedly. He started kissing down his neck again. “You can’t even say it, you baby. That thing you like.”

Dean kept staring at the wall, his hands running over Sam’s shoulders. “Whatever. It’s weird.”

“It’s not weird, it’s natural, and you love it.”

“I tolerate it.”

“You love it,” Sam insisted. He sucked a hickey at the junction of his neck and shoulder, soaking the collar of his shirt, and listened to him huff quietly with pleasure. “Remember when you rode me in the back seat at that lookout?”

Dean just went ugh, but Sam sure as hell remembered it. The idea of car sex became strangely monolithic to him after the thing in that prairie town, watching Dean and that guy in the parking lot and getting so hot over it that it blasted all deniability out of his head. He’d finally gotten Dean to let him fuck him in the car one otherwise inconsequential night last spring.

“Wish you’d forget,” Dean griped.

It had been a cold night and their breath steamed the windows like the goddamn Titanic. There wasn’t much space to move and it was this grinding, tantric thing, Dean’s hands clutching his shoulders so hard it hurt, or else grabbing at the seat back. Towards the end he turned around and rode him that way, bouncing in his lap, braced against the front seat.

Sam kissed his throat, the sharp jut of his Adam’s apple, the misshapen part of his broken-healed collarbone.

“You get so blissed out. I never get to see you like that.”

He ran his hands down Dean’s sides, around and over the curve of his ass, and felt him tense up. Another breathless little noise.

“Would you shut up?”

“You love taking dick and you don’t let yourself do it.”

“I would if you’d shut up!” Dean hissed. “If you’re gonna be weird about it, I’m—”

“I’m done, I’m done. Promise.” He grabbed his ass with both hands and pulled him against him. Dean’s knees fell open and he let him get between them. “I got you.”

Dean groaned like he was mad and let his head fall back. Sam kept groping his ass. Dean rarely let him spend much time back there, period, which he decided was twenty percent Dean’s rigid tough-guy masculinity and eighty percent some messed up big brother thing (one time when Sam went for it, Dean knocked his hands away and said, “I’m older,” like they were arguing about who got to ride shotgun, and refused to elaborate even a little).

Sam stretched for his nightstand and pulled his lube out of the drawer, where it rested menacingly next to his gun.

“You made a production of it, I thought you were gonna ask me to piss on you or something.”

“Hey, the night’s young.”

“Don’t make me call that bluff.” He flicked the cap open and Dean practically flinched. “You sure about this?”

Dean was flushed blotchy all the way down his throat and chest, broken up by the black band of his shirt stretched across the top of his pecs, and the pissy glare he fixed on Sam only made it better. Sam’s dick twitched against his thigh in anticipation.

“Alright,” Sam answered his own question. “But relax, you’re supposed to like it.”

Dean grumbled at him, a couple half words and at least one ‘bitch,’ but he lay down and let Sam slick up his fingers with minimal complaints. Sam kissed down his chest and mouthed at his dick, played with his balls, tried to get him to loosen up. After a minute he was sighing and moving against the sheets, no snide comments when Sam stroked his wet fingers over his taint.

He slid a finger inside him and felt his whole body jolt, then forcibly relax. It went surprisingly easy. He glanced up at him. 

“Uh. Did you prep?”

Dean shrugged, embarrassed.

“No. Well, not for you. Empty motel last night, pay-per-view, you know how it is.”

The thought of Dean fucking himself—on what, his fingers? He didn’t think he’d survive learning that he owned toys—almost knocked him out. Arm crooked under his leg on an ugly motel bedspread, other hand wrapped around his dick, mouth sagged open and eyes fixed on the screen.

He slid another finger in and Dean closed his eyes. He dripped more lube and worked them inside him, right to the knuckle, and watched his dick leap against his stomach. He picked it up with his free hand and teased under the head; it took everything he had not to touch himself instead, just straddle him again and jerk off over his face.

“That’s so hot,” he breathed, not caring that Dean laughed at him. “You fingering yourself. I wanna see you do that. Another time. Later.”

Dean was still laughing, but that was good, he seemed more relaxed about it. He lifted a knee, let his head drop back against the pillow and breathed out long and slow while his hands moved around anxiously, at first flexing in the sheets and then touching his stomach, back in the sheets and pressing down into the bed, reaching for Sam’s leg, just too far.

“Maybe if you ask real nice,” he said, delayed and distracted. Sam picked up the pace and stroked the fingers inside him, searching, and felt the physical ripple of pleasure that coursed through him. “We never did that? Jerked off in front of each other?”

“Dunno. Seems like an oversight.”

He couldn’t remember, but it seemed crazy that they hadn’t. Maybe they got too distracted by each other and never made it very far, he would’ve remembered Dean fingering himself.

“Yeah,” Dean said, his voice rough in a way that made Sam think he wasn’t replying. His hips tipped down, his back lifting off the bed. “God—”

“Yeah?”

“Oh, Christ, yeah.”

Dean put a hand over his face, dragged it off, thought better of it and covered his face again, his hips moving involuntarily against Sam’s hand. Sam liked to tease him and make him talk, but he usually got so embarrassed all by himself that it felt like a cheap shot. It was rare that he got him on his back because he always wanted to hide his face.

Sam started jerking him off in earnest, watching him thrust up into the circle of his fingers and down onto the hand inside him. He’d never get tired of seeing his fingers disappear into his body, the soft heat of his insides and his pale spread thighs, never sun-kissed like the rest of him. Sweat started to shine in the valley between his pecs and Sam leaned over him and licked it away.

“Sammy,” Dean panted, tangling fingers in his hair. “Come on, don’t— don’t—”

His dick was drooling over Sam’s fingers, his stomach flexing tense with every stroke inside him. Sam slowed down, feather light up the underside of his shaft.

“Turn over.”

Dean’s eyes went hot and sharp, the kind of look that scanned the exits.

“Are you—”

“Trust me.”

There was no rebuttal to ‘trust me’ except ‘I don’t,’ and Dean did, so he rolled over onto his stomach and let Sam put a pillow under his hips. When Sam started kissing down his spine and over his ass cheeks, he scoffed.

“I knew it. Lemme shower if you’re gonna—”

“Nah.”

He spread him open and licked a stripe from his balls over his hole with the flat of his tongue, and Dean twitched so hard he heard his hand thump against the wall.

“You’re so gross.”

His voice was wobbly. Sam knew better than to listen.

“Learned it from you.”

Another lick and Dean groaned into his folded arms, shuddering as Sam licked him again and again, sucked his fingers and slid them back inside him, curling and scissoring.

He pushed his knees wider against the bed. “Jesus, how’d you get good at this?”

“Dunno.” Sam speared him with his tongue, then his fingers and then his tongue again, and he made an unholy noise. “Eating pussy?”

“Fuck, I’d pay to see that. You like it?”

“So goddamn much.”

“Atta boy.”

He was so worked up he could hardly think, he couldn’t imagine how Dean was faring. He kept eating him out mostly to give himself more time to calm down, make it last, and he sounded so good, breathing hard and practically whining, sounds muffled by what was clearly his hand in his mouth. Sam was dizzy with it, outside of time.

“Fuck,” Dean choked, “Sammy—”

Sam pulled back to breathe, his fingers crooked inside him and stroking, stroking, feeling his whole body tense up.

“You want it?”

He also wanted to draw it out to knock Dean down a peg, make him lose it, remind him who he belonged to. The thought of it made this unbearably possessive heat rise in the back of his throat, one that wanted to bruise and mark. He didn’t know if it was really as unfamiliar a feeling as he thought or if he was just good at tamping it down, telling himself that he wasn’t like that, just Dean, but it was him, he was just as bad.

“You want it?” he asked again, when Dean only spat a string of curses at him. 

“Yes, yeah, fuck, come on, do it—”

Sam laughed and Dean tried to kick at him with his heel. He pulled his fingers out and showered kisses all down the backs of his thighs, dodging another heel and more mindless urging, come on Sammy come on I don’t do this to you you bitch come ON.

He went back to his open nightstand for condoms, sat back between Dean’s legs and rolled one on. He found the lube lost in the comforter and sheets and slicked up, biting down on a buck of pleasure at his hand on himself, still too close for all his efforts and stalling.

He smoothed his hands up Dean’s back, under the sweaty stretch of his shirt over his shoulder blades, kissed the back of his neck and bit his ear before leaning back. He held the base of his dick and pressed the head against him, and started to ease in slow, torturous, insistent pressure until the head was in and they both groaned. He fisted a hand in Dean’s shirt.

“Oh, fuck—”

Dean made this hiccough noise and pushed back against him in one hard motion until he was halfway in, and Sam felt him get tighter and tighter in these hard pulses and his arm came up and his knuckles bent to white against the back of his own head. He gasped as he bucked against the pillow.

“Wh— are you coming?”

Sam slid a hand under his hip and he was, he was still pulsing, thick and wet soaking the pillow case. He moaned and rutted against Sam’s palm and rode it out. Sam didn’t have time to help him with much else, trying not to follow him over the edge from the rhythmic clench of his body around him, and he was almost panting by the time Dean went still.

“Holy shit. First time?”

“Bite me,” Dean said into his arms, sounding fucked. Sam rubbed his back and his hips started to move in helpless little thrusts.

“You make fun of me, but I can’t believe how easy you come.”

“You were fucking around back there for like twenty minutes, what am I supposed to do?”

“Your body’s natural state is coming, you’re like a wind-up toy. How do you get anything done?”

“Perseverance through hardship. Now go, shit—”

He pulled out and thrust in, shallow, wanting to be careful but feeling caution ebb away under his hands, clutching at Dean as he tried to push back on him. 

“Come on, all of it, Sammy, all of it—”

His broken voice is what made Sam snap, going blind and deaf with wanting because Dean didn’t make a habit of begging but, Jesus, he was begging then, and he bucked into him and Dean sobbed, like he was relieved, and that was it. Sam pushed inside him, all the way, until his hips were snug against his ass and Dean was fucking inconsolable, his shoulders hunching up, hands scrabbling in the sheets.

Sam wasn’t going to last. Not even a little. He made peace with it.

He grabbed him by the waist and started hammering into him, so slick and easy after Dean and his fucking prep, and he had to swallow the sounds that wanted to spill out of him, the dorm walls were paper, he’d already overheard more than he ever wanted to and didn’t want to let anyone hear him, his helpless grunts of pleasure that were just for Dean, who clearly wasn’t on the same page.

“Fuck, Sammy, yeah, just like that, just— that’s good, that’s so good, baby, that’s—”

He wanted to shove his face into the pillow and settled for a hand hard on his upper back, all his weight on it, which he seemed to like, and which shut him up a bit, reduced to stifled groans each time Sam’s hips snapped into him fast. The long hot drag of the entire length of him was so unbearable Sam could feel everything rushing towards an end too soon, way too soon. He hung his head and watched his cock disappear into Dean’s body and he looked fucking beautiful, shining with sweat and trying to get his legs farther apart, get Sam deeper in him. 

“I lied,” Dean panted, barely coherent, “before, it was you.”

He couldn’t tell if he misheard him or if his brain just couldn’t parse the words. He slowed his hips to help clear his head and Dean groaned at the loss.

“What?”

“They didn’t have porn, at the motel last night, I was thinking about you—doing—this—”

He broke off with a shout when Sam picked up the pace again, mindless at the thought of his cagey, try-hard brother alone in a motel room with just his hand and memories and imagination, getting off on the thought of being fucked by him.

Dean buried his face in his arms again and he sounded like nothing had ever felt so good, like he couldn’t stand it, and Sam went completely offline. His whole body ached and his breath burned in his lungs, every muscle straining with the force he was fucking him with, holding him down, slamming into him again and again. He wanted to come more than he’d ever wanted anything and he chased it, he hauled Dean back and up to his knees for a better angle and then the slap of their skin was obscene and Dean got so tight he thought he might be coming again.

“Sammy,” Dean panted, and Sam was Sammy in bed more than he was anywhere else and that was saying something, there was something gross and delicious about it, it sounded like begging, “Sammy, fuck, do it, please.”

Sam had gotten maybe three pleases out of Dean in his whole life, and that stab of out-of-context little brother pride almost killed him on the spot. He set a quick, brutal rhythm to fuck it out of his head; Dean was too far gone for his sounds to be words anymore, thank God, who knew what else he’d say.

He could feel Dean stripping his dick, frantic and out of time with his thrusts, and maybe they’d done this hundreds of times together last year but this raw desperation was new, product of a distance that had never been there before, Dean going to absolute pieces and Sam miles out of his mind with it, and that’s what finally did him in. He gasped and sobbed and came as deep inside him as he could go, folded all the way over him, his forehead pressed to the back of his sweaty shoulder and his hands clutching his hips as he emptied inside him. It was porny and impractical but he wished idly that he’d gone in bare so he could watch his come drip out of him.

Dean came again, he was pretty sure. He thought he might have blacked out for a second, but Dean’s hand had gone still, and not much made him stop besides getting there. 

“Holy fuck,” Dean said, more than a little dreamy.

Sam tucked his face into the crook of his neck, hot like an iron and wet with sweat. He curled an arm under his shoulders and held him close. He knew he must have been crushing him, but Dean didn’t shove him off; he twisted his arm back and tangled it in Sam’s hair. He could feel Dean’s heart thrumming against his chest through his back, both of them panting like they’d run a marathon. Nothing was better than this sludgy euphoria. He’d never been unhappy. He’d never been anywhere else.

“You okay?” he mumbled, kissing Dean’s neck, once, twice. Dean laughed, a coughing hack of a noise.

“I think you put my back out.”

“You wanted it.”

“Yeah, and you delivered. Guess this place hasn’t completely removed your balls yet.”

Sam eased his weight up onto his elbows and felt Dean take a grateful breath in. He knew he should slide off him but couldn’t make himself move, or pull out. Pleasure kept rolling through him at every involuntary pulse of Dean’s body around his spent cock and being exhausted together, naked and close, felt mind-numbingly intimate.

Dean must have been similarly fucked, because he took one of Sam’s hands in his, brought it to his mouth and kissed it. His face was burning hot. 

“Never had a chance to miss you before,” he mumbled, rubbing Sam’s knuckles across his lips. “S’nice. If this is what the reunion sex is like.”

“Mhhmm.”

“Fuckin’ outstanding.”

“Yeah.”

He turned his head and scrubbed his cheek against Dean’s prickly hair. He wondered if he could fall asleep like that, still inside him, but another minute went by and Dean wheezed and lifted up.

“Jesus, you’re heavy.”

Sam struggled his way off him, sat up and pulled out and apologized quietly at Dean’s pained hiss. 

“You’re okay?” he asked, leaning over Dean to chuck out the condom. Dean sprawled on his back and scrubbed sweat out of his eyes.

“Nothing a couple hours’ sleep sharing a crummy twin bed won’t fix.” 

He scooted back against the wall and Sam lay down next to him on his side, still breathing hard. He pushed Sam’s sweaty hair off his forehead and curled it around his ear for him, and he looked dead tired and used up, swollen lips, sweaty and glowing and almost happy.

“It’s been a long year, huh?”

“Eight months.”

“Well, it felt like a year.”

Sam chuckled. He closed his eyes, opened them and saw Dean still looking at him. His whole body throbbed so nicely, fizzling out warm and soft in his lips, his hands, his softening cock. His blinks got longer and longer. Dean’s breath washed over his face, only inches away on the one clean pillow, Dean’s knobby ankle bone dug into his calf, his lean legs tangled with his, his knuckles stroked gently over the inside of his forearm curled between them.

“Hey,” Dean whispered. He tipped his head and booped Sam’s nose with his own. “Sammy. You’re falling asleep.”

“Am not,” Sam mumbled, his eyes still closed.

“I taught you better than to pass out afterwards. Wake up. Talk to me.”

“About what?”

“I dunno. School. What classes are you taking this semester?”

Sam groaned and shuffled in closer, tucking his head under Dean’s chin, earning a laugh from Dean.

“Uh. Dunno.” He tried to think. His hand wandered up Dean’s arm. “Econ. An intro thing, it’s required. Uh… English… something.”

“English something. Sounds cool.”

“Shut up. What do you care?”

Dean nudged him again. “I care because talk to me. I didn’t drive all this way to sleep.”

Sam burrowed further against his chest, smiling. He couldn’t remember ever being so cozy in his goddamn life, so safe and warm and sleepy. Dean wanted to stay up to spend time with him. Tired or not, he was tempted to pull an all-nighter, get dressed and walk to a convenience store to get energy drinks, find the deck of cards he knew Dean kept in the car and just bask in each other. Maybe Dean would stay tomorrow, too, he could get someone to cover his shift at the bar, and they could get some beers and he could show him around the city. Maybe he could stay all weekend.

He slid his hand up Dean’s smooth, bare arm, over the swell of his bicep, but stopped when he hit his shirt sleeve, confused.

“Has this been on the whole time? Take it off, weirdo, we’re going to sleep.”

He tugged at the sleeve and froze. It was crunchy. He blinked himself awake and drew his hand back. He had flaky black stuff on the pads of his fingers. The shirt was already black, there was no stark dark patch.

“Is this blood?”

He had his answer when Dean wouldn’t look at him.

“Dean!” He struggled out of Dean’s arms and tried to shove his sleeve up. “You said it was a scratch!”

Dean batted his hands away. “It is! Go to sleep!”

Sam sat up and managed to shove Dean down to the bed long enough to push his sleeve out of the way. Sure enough, he had a sizable gash on his arm a few inches down from his shoulder, not still bleeding but crusted with dried blood, swollen to an angry red and, in places, glinting with broken glass.

“There’s glass in it, you freak!”

He manhandled Dean up enough to pull the shirt over his head, then threw it in his face. Dean threw it back at him.

“I didn’t want to make a big thing of it!”

“You were bleeding! You said it didn’t hurt, you psycho!”

“I was gonna say something, but you got all horny on me and I didn’t wanna distract you!”

“Freak!” Sam said again. He rolled out of bed, dodging Dean’s clutching hands trying to pull him back. “Up. Go. That needs butterflies at least.”

“It’s—”

Sam stormed to the hook by the door he kept his towel on and threw the towel at him.

“And to get the fucking glass out, idiot.” He got his spare towel from the closet and tied it around his waist, then hunched to dig through his closet. “I’ve got a med kit somewhere.”

“Once a hunter, always a hunter,” Dean said, all soft and sentimental, and Sam scoffed.

“Not the time.”

“It’s cute. Got a gun under the pillow and everything. You sleep in jeans, too?”

“No.” He found the kit and straightened up to find Dean tying the towel around his hips. He grabbed his shower kit and shoved Dean towards the door. “Showers are down the hall. Hang a right.”

The hallway was quiet and empty and they were silent in their bare feet.

“We don’t need to shower for just my arm,” Dean said. “Coulda been dressed.”

“We need to shower ‘cause you reek.”

Dean shoved him and he almost bounced off the wall.

The men’s showers were, thankfully, deserted. It was a big white-tiled room divided down the middle, an open shower room on the left and rows of sinks and toilets on the right. Sam steered Dean left.

“So what, were you just like, in pain that whole time?” Sam asked. He set his toiletries and the med kit on a white painted bench out of the way of the showers, and when he looked up, Dean winked at him.

“You kept me distracted.”

Sam rolled his eyes and hung up his towel. Dean did the same. After a lifetime of school locker rooms, Sam had practice at not looking whether he wanted to or not, and strode for the showers.

Dean whistled. “No stalls? This is sexy.”

Sam laughed and picked one of the showers along the wall, twisted the knob and stood out of the way while the water heated up, his hand outstretched under it.

“You’re so weird.”

“This is the start of a billion gay pornos. The football team is gonna come in any second now and call us pussies, then take turns railing us.”

“Shh, Jesus, someone’s gonna hear you.”

“So what? They’ll know I’m right.”

“Shut up and bring me that washcloth.”

Dean did as he was told. Sam maneuvered him under the warm shower and dabbed the wet cloth over his wound. Dean hissed.

“Baby,” Sam muttered. Dean kicked at his shin.

He didn’t worry at it too much. When he was done, he dropped the cloth and they both lathered their hair, rinsed and soaped up. He had his eyes closed and his head hung forward when he felt Dean slide up behind him.

“Hey. Public.”

His body was warm and solid. The amulet dug in between his shoulder blades and his dick fit into the cleft of his ass, soft and thick. He felt him run his hands up his slippery arms, and the rumble of his laugh.

“I know, I know. We’ve had enough shower sex to last a lifetime, I can’t help it.”

Sam chuckled and let his head drop back against his shoulder. It was still so early, no one would come in. He let water run into his mouth.

“Me neither. I always think about you.”

“When you shower?”

“Yeah.” He closed his eyes. Dean’s soapy hands slid over his hips and up the new, flat hardness of his stomach, his fingers spread wide. He couldn’t find the energy to stop him and didn’t want to. “I can’t believe he doesn’t know.”

There was a nervous beat. “Dad?”

“Yeah. You ever think about that? He caught us both in the bathroom a few times, with the door locked. He didn’t think we were showering together?”

He felt Dean tense up. He was stupid to say anything. 

“He probably thought you were at the sink. No guy assumes his adult sons are showering together.”

“I know. Sorry.” And he was, but he wanted to ask more, prod at it, did he ever say anything to you? Did you ever catch him catch us looking? What about now, does he talk about it? But nothing to do with John was any of his business anymore. “Sorry,” he said again.

Dean slid a soapy hand over his soft dick and maybe it was the conversation, but it was weirdly nonsexual, like he was just cleaning him up the way he’d clean himself. It was nice.

“All good,” Dean said, and nudged him back under the spray to rinse off.

They dried off after and took the med kit over to the sink side, Sam with a towel around his waist, Dean nude.

“Not really that kind of locker room,” Sam said, allowing himself a look. Dean’s lean legs, curved thighs, pert ass. Not a bad view.

“It’s always that kind of locker room.” He hopped up on the counter and, after consideration, lay his towel over his lap. “Prude.”

Sam ignored him. He opened his kit and started the gross and meticulous work of tweezing glass out of his wound. Other than the occasional huff and sigh of pain, Dean was quiet. A sink at the far end of the row dripped rhythmically, plinking against the porcelain. The few shards in his wound were small and it was like playing Operation; Dean didn’t say anything, but he watched his face scrunch up in pain and apologized quietly, sorry, sorry. Once he got it out, he cleaned it with peroxide. 

“Look who’s too good for vodka,” Dean teased.

“Shut up, it came with the kit.”

Sam tried at first with butterfly stitches, but the cut was too short and wide. Dean didn’t seem to care, but he never did, and at least this kit had the right materials, not floss or fishing line. It had been a while, but Sam remembered the motions. Bile only rose in his throat a little, staring into the fleshy, bloody insides of the wound. He talked to keep his mind off it.

“It’s kind of lame, sometimes.”

“What is?”

“This. All of it. School, and friends, and the whole thing. I dunno if lame’s the right word, but…”

Dean shrugged with his free shoulder.

“Sometimes being happy is lame. Holding hands with a girl at the movies isn’t as exciting as having her stomp on your balls, but you get different things out of it.”

“I hate your metaphors.”

“They get the point across.”

A few more stitches worth of silence. Dean reached out and brushed his knuckles against the wedge of Sam’s thigh bared below the fold of his towel.

“Speaking of girls.”

“Nope.”

“Sammy. We gotta talk.”

Sam sighed. He was stupid to think it would be this easy, after all their talking before he left. Sam was supposed to get over him. This, specifically, wasn’t supposed to happen, and Dean didn’t even know he’d cancelled plans with Jess to hang out with him. He’d bitch him to hell and back if he knew.

“What’s there to talk about?”

“Don’t be a brat.” Dean shifted against the counter, the edge of a sink digging into his ass. “You’ve got a girl who, for some reason, has decided to let you touch her. And you actually like talking to her, for fuck’s sake. You can’t give that up cause you’re hung up on your own brother.”

“I’m not—”

“I shouldn’t have come here.”

He didn’t want to get into this. He wanted to go back to the sex and the sweetness and the intimate quiet of an empty shower room. Dean’s guilt didn’t leave room for anything else anywhere.

“There was a ghost,” he tried.

“There’s always a ghost, Sammy, grow up. I came here for you.” Dean shook his head. “I can’t expect you to get over me when I keep dropping into your life like—”

“You didn’t make me do anything, I wanted to see you. I’m not a kid, you’re not fucking with me, I can make my own decisions.”

“But this is exactly what we talked about,” Dean interrupted. “I can’t be the reason you don’t go for this stuff, man. I can’t live with myself.”

“This has nothing to—”

“It has everything to do with me, you’re in love with me.”

Sam froze, like that was a secret at all.

“So what?”

He sounded guilty and he knew it.

“So, you’re not thinking straight. Don’t fuck this up with her, alright?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“You are, at least kind of, always my business.”

Anyone else and he’d be insulted, but they were, and always had been, so far up each other’s business that it had stopped being worth it to pretend. Not healthy, but insurmountable. 

He realized he’d left the thread hanging out of Dean’s arm. He went back to it, his fingers buzzing with conflict-adrenaline.

“Okay,” he said slowly. “If things work out with Jess, we’ll put the brakes on. I’m not gonna cheat on her.”

“Good.”

“If it’s an exclusive thing. If that’s where it goes.”

“Of course that’s where it’s going. You love love. You’re gonna buy her flowers and shit.”

“Shut up.”

Dean was smiling. That was probably good. He put his knuckles against Sam’s thigh again and rubbed them back and forth as Sam finished the final stitch.

“I got used to being the only one you’d ever been with,” Dean said, uncharacteristically soft. “I know that’s fucked, but it is what it is. Now you’re with other people and I dunno, it’s weird. It’s hot.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I think about how you learned everything from me, and now you’re boning some girl the way you fucked me. It’s hot.”

“Glad to hear it.”

“Yeah, me too. I coulda been such a freak about this.”

“This isn’t you being a freak?”

“Not like I could be. I dunno, I just— you look happy. For real. It’s great.”

He looked over. Sitting up on the counter, his face was a little above Sam’s. The fluorescents made him pale and sallow but his eyes were brighter than ever, new-growth green.

“Are you happy?” he asked, so close Sam could feel his breath. He only had to think about it for a second.

“Yeah.”

He kissed him. He smelled like his soap, his skin warm and damp, his mouth sour and unbrushed. He made a soft noise in his throat and his hand came up to Sam’s arm to hold him, a possessive, dragging grip.

There was the raucous sound of boys coming down the hall, voices all talking over each other.

Sam stood back and looked nervously at Dean, who just shrugged.

“We’re not doing anything wrong.”

A parade of young, entitled all-Americans streamed through the doorway, shaggy hair and bony shoulders and acne. Sam recognized them as some of the guys from the soccer team, and they recognized him back.

“Winchester!”

“Hey, Sam.”

“Sam!”

A few guys stopped and leaned in the doorway by the sinks, one of whom was a guy named Tyler, team captain, who Sam liked well enough. Tyler jabbed a finger at him.

“Winchester, your early-riser shit is like, serial killer behaviour. It’s five AM.”

“Hey, you’re up, too.”

“We’re heading down to LA for the weekend, maybe Tijuana if we’re feeling frisky. What’s your excuse?”

All at once, they seemed to notice the naked stranger sitting on the counter. Dean waved at them. Sam jumped in.

“Oh. Uh, Dean, guys, guys, Dean.”

He wouldn’t go anywhere near the brother-boyfriend paradox. He suspected it wouldn’t come up, given the distraction of the nakedness and Dean’s still-open wound; they could draw their own conclusions and it still wouldn’t be worse than the truth.

“Hi,” Dean said. “I fell.”

Sam watched a few sets of eyes rove over the non-wounded parts of Dean’s body, and if there was a meaningful difference between checking someone out and shit this guy has way too many scars, he couldn’t find it.

“On a beer bottle,” Sam added, in an attempt to college it up. They seemed to accept this and started to file into the showers.

“Gnar,” one guy offered. “You wanna come to Tijuana?”

Dean looked at Sam with expectant eyebrows. Sam ignored him.

“We’re good, but thanks.”

“Your loss. Take it easy, army medic.”

The guys left for the showers, their loudness echoing off the tile. Tyler stuck his head back in after a second. 

“Oh, hey, you’re not gonna work out today, are you?”

Sam wasn’t, but: “Dunno, why?”

“Don’t go in the weight room, Kyle was saying a bunch of weird shit about some chick attacking him last night? I’ve got no idea, but I think they’re closing it later.”

Sam looked at Dean. “Right. Thanks.”

Tyler gave him a little salute and disappeared again. When he looked back at Dean, he was grinning.

“You have guys,” he said, giddy.

“I just play soccer with them.”

“You boys gonna crush some brewskis later? Chase some skirt, Winchester?”

“God, shut up.”

“You’re such a jock, I raised you better than that. Go do some blow or destroy public property, you square.”

Sam poked him very gently with the needle, and Dean nearly slapped it out of his hand.

“Slap a bandage on that bad boy, we’re done here.”

They headed back down the hall in silence. Dean was slightly ahead of him and he watched the muscles in his smooth, pale back move, and heat grew inside him. As they walked, he reached over and slid his hand up the back of Dean’s towel and grabbed his ass.

“Sam. What did we just talk about?”

“You’re already here. That starts tomorrow.”

“It’s already tomorrow.”

“So it starts tomorrow tomorrow.” They reached his door, and instead of opening it, he crowded up behind Dean. “You got another round in you?”

Dean laughed and shook his head, mostly at himself. “Only one way to find out.”

He turned around and Sam kissed him, wedging the med kit under his arm to have a free hand to spread over Dean’s throat. He groaned at the feel of it and pushed him up against the door with his whole body.

Dean said, “You’re so shovey, when did you get shovey?”

“I fuck girls now, it’s making my hormones go nuts.”

He laughed so loud it echoed in his ears. “You think so?”

“I go to college, you’re not allowed dispute me.”

Another kiss, ferocious, sucking on Dean’s lip and grabbing his whole face in his hand. He wanted Dean to fuck him, he wanted to get filled up the way he hadn’t been all year, to get every thought about school and girls and family and money fucked clean out of his head until he was nothing but a mess of nerves and spit and grabbing hands, going to pieces on his brother’s dick. He was so tired he could feel his heartbeat pounding in his head, but he wanted it hard and slow and crushing, all Dean’s weight on him, mumbling sweetly against his cheek while he was so deep inside him he could taste it. That would be worth staying up for.

He slid his hand down Dean’s stomach and over the front of his towel where his hardening dick had started to lift it. The drag of his hand over the terry cloth made the tucked knot slip loose and Dean’s hand flew to it to keep it up. He pushed his palm over the shape of him getting fuller by the second and Dean tried to move back for a breath, but he was right up against the door.

“You wanna—” He turned his head; Sam chased his mouth. “—go inside, or just—paw at each other in the hallway like fucking animals?”

“Paw.”

“Yeah? Is that the kind of dumb little mood you’re in?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Dean bit his top lip hard enough to make a throb of pain course through his face. His voice was gravel and rock salt. “I hope you hate your neighbours, ‘cause I’m gonna make you scream.”

There was a noise behind them that Sam hardly heard over the rush of their breath: the creak of a door and, almost but not silent, a shallow gasp.

He whirled around and tried to get his hands off Dean but it was like a nightmare where you moved as if through molasses and couldn’t make your body work, terrifyingly slow, too sticky, too late. Five fingers peeling off Dean’s skin one at a time, the burn of adrenaline in his muscles as he spun, wrenched back—

Jess’ face was just visible in the crack of her door as she closed it.

“Jess!” he called, not thinking, deaf in his own ears. 

The door didn’t open again. It was a nightmare. Seconds ticked by and it was still a nightmare, no gasp and jerk back into the waking world.

Dean put a hand over his mouth. “Oh, fuck.”

Sam spun around and fumbled for his doorknob, shoved Dean over the threshold and slammed it behind them, like he could leave the whole thing out there.

“Fuck!”

“Sammy—”

“I’m so fucking stupid. I’m so fucking stupid, she knows! She knows we’re brothers, Dean, she knows—”

Dean grabbed his arms to stop his frantic pacing. “Hey, hey! I know, I know, calm down.”

“I gotta talk to her. I’ve gotta say something, I can’t—”

“Hey, sit, breathe, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

“In what universe is this okay?”

“This one. Sit down.”

He sat on the bed when Dean all but pushed him down and put his face in his hands.

Dean said over the phone that he saw Bobby once since he found out, in the fall, and it had been like pulling teeth having someone as rough around the edges as Bobby Singer not be able to look him in the eye, but Jess wasn’t rough around anything and Bobby had known them their whole lives so there was a certain amount of shit he was willing to put up with, and Jess had known him for six months and there wasn’t. She wouldn’t stick around, he’d be lucky if she didn’t request to be moved to a new dorm let alone ever speak to him again, let alone like him.

Dean was rubbing his back and he wondered how long he’d been doing it for. 

“I’ve gotta talk to her,” Sam said miserably. “Right now. I can’t let her think about it, I’ve gotta explain.”

“If that’s what you want.”

“I’ve gotta say something, I can’t just let her—I don’t know. I can’t say nothing.”

“Okay,” Dean said again, nodding, his hand still rubbing slow circles over his back. “You can tell her about me, and us, and whatever you want there, but… you can’t tell her about the rest of it. Like, our life. Monsters. You know that.”

“I know.” Sam ground his face into his palms. “I know. I wouldn’t.”

“Okay. I know it’d make the rest go down easier, but…”

“Yeah. I know.”

He sat up. Dean’s hand slid down his back, then off. He looked as miserable as Sam felt, tired and empty.

“It’s your call,” he said. “Whatever you need. You want me to…”

He nodded at the door. Sam shook his head hard, sick at the sheer thought of Dean leaving.

“No. God, stay, please.”

“Okay.”

“I’ll come right back.”

“Sure.”

Dean stayed on the bed and watched Sam get dressed, a worn shirt off the floor and his jeans from earlier. He curled his wet hair behind his ears. Dean was still sitting on the bed in his towel when he was done. He was twisting his ring around his finger over and over again.

“I’ll come back,” Sam said again, and Dean just nodded. He left.

Across the hall, he knocked on Jess’ door. His hands were numb, his heart beating so hard he could feel it in his face, in his throat. She wouldn’t answer, why would she answer?

She answered. Just like before, her face appeared in the crack between the door and the frame.

“Hi.”

Her voice was tiny. He had no idea what to do with the look on her face.

“Hey. Can I talk to you for a second? Please?”

It was already too much to ask, to put this on her. She didn’t owe him a chance to explain.

She nodded and let the door open.

“Yeah. Come in.”

He followed her inside. Her roommate was gone again, thank fucking God for that. The last time he was in her room, he’d been in her bed, in the glow of that pink scarf over the lamp and it had been perfect. If he’d known the next time he’d be in her room was going to be like this, he would’ve… He didn’t know what he would have done. Something different.

She sat on the end of her bed. He stayed standing and shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from fidgeting. She had obviously just woken up, her hair pulled into a bun on top of her head, wearing plaid sleep shorts and an old high school t-shirt.

He forced himself to speak.

“I… don’t know what to say.”

But he did. He knew the second he walked through the door, it was just a matter of how.

Jess put her hands between her knees, maybe trying to keep from fidgeting in the same way he was.

“Why did you tell me he was your brother?”

Sam’s heart went dead. Nothing could be worse than this, nothing he ever imagined. Like Dean said about John, her mind hadn’t gone there, the truth wasn’t even in the realm of possibility for her. She’d let him in under false pretenses, she thought he was, at worst, lying about being single. She had no idea.

“I—”

“You didn’t want me to know he was your boyfriend? Or your ex? I know we haven’t talked about it, and I like you—”

“Jess—”

“—but I’m not like, possessive, we’re not there, not that I don’t want— I just mean, you could’ve told me he was…”

She trailed off. He closed his eyes, he couldn’t look at her when he said it. Blood pounded deafening in his ears like a kick drum, BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM, keeping time until the imminent end of his life.

“He is my brother,” he said, then braced for impact.

The silence screamed around them. Someone walked by in the hall outside, talking and laughing, an unwelcome intrusion. His ears went boom, waiting. If she thought he was joking, he couldn’t take it.

“Adopted?” she tried.

He couldn’t open his eyes. He recognized her hopeful tone from victims’ families, people whose loved ones had been killed by something they couldn’t fathom picking through insanity to find some shred of plausibility, desperately bargaining for solid ground. But he couldn’t keep lying. Everything he couldn’t tell her was already too much, he couldn’t live with one more thing.

“Jess, we look the same. Think about it.”

That wasn’t strictly true, but there was enough in their greenish eyes, the shape of their jaws and their cleft chins to connect the dots. A matching set of beautiful boys made at the same factory.

Jess said what any normal person would say: “Oh my God.”

He opened his eyes. Jess was staring at him, frozen. He couldn’t remember ever being so scared. His lips were numb and some words fell out.

“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. I…”

He didn’t know what he was saying until after he said it, everything just came out on the frantic, terrified impulse to justify it.

“We—we didn’t—grow up right. We didn’t have anyone else. It got out of hand, and I didn’t— Fuck, I don’t know what to say.” He put his hand over his eyes and pressed hard. He wouldn’t cry. “I wasn’t a kid. It wasn’t bad, he didn’t—I can’t explain it. I’m okay. He’s okay. It’s just… this… thing, about me.”

“Sam. It’s okay.”

“It’s not. It’s so gross and I shouldn’t— it’s not your problem. It’s a fucking mess. I’m so sorry you saw and I’m sorry I lied to you.”

He didn’t know if he really thought it was gross. Everything felt different now that it hit the air, this thing that was precious and secret and nobody’s business but theirs was suddenly being held up to outside scrutiny and everything that had been beautiful and special looked tawdry and sick in the light of day.

“Don’t worry about me, I’m not— it’s okay,” she said again, but it sounded automatic. He couldn’t see how it was okay. “So… there is no boyfriend.”

Sam nodded, looking down at his hands. He was still just standing in the middle of her room and he felt like an idiot, but he couldn’t bear to sit down. He took a few weird steps around and back in nervous motion.

“He’s like my guardian, and my best friend, and my boyfriend, and I’m trying to figure out where any of that starts and stops, and it—it got fucked up somewhere, and I’m so sorry to bring you into it.”

He couldn’t stop apologizing and he didn’t even know what for, not really. For everything, for existing.

She said, “Then, your dad…”

His eyes slammed shut.

“Don’t. Sorry. I can’t. I can’t talk about him right now.”

He’d never be able to explain the mental toll of keeping a secret from your own father that you knew he’d hate you for, the thing with the truth spell and all the near-misses that came after it, leaping apart at the sound of the car or the scrape of a key in the lock, fitting his hand tight over Dean’s mouth with only a thin motel wall separating them and him. How dumb they had to be to do it anyways, how bad they wanted it and how much it meant to them in the face of all that. It wasn’t an option of doing it or not doing it, loving Dean was as involuntary as breathing. He worried it always would be.

“I’m sorry,” Jess said softly, and Sam hated himself. He hated that he brought this into her life, that he’d become a story she told other people someday, I found out this guy I hooked up with in college was fucking his own brother, real hillbilly shit, how gross is that. He wasn’t special, she couldn’t spit on this campus without hitting a guy who was smart and tall and didn’t come with a metric ton of baggage.

“It’s not your problem,” he said again. “He knows about you. It’s not— we’re not like that.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

“I’m not with him. It’s not like that.”

“Okay.”

“He really is here for work,” he added lamely.

She just nodded, and it was quiet again for too long. He thought he should go and tried to figure out how to leave.

“Sam,” she said softly. “Come sit.”

His heart never stopped hammering and only sped up then. He crossed her room on shaky legs and sat next to her on the bed, thinking of how he spent the night there not that long ago and they’d been laughing and kissing and he wanted that, still, he did. Dean was right and he hated it.

He had to try to fix it. He rubbed his sweating hands on his jeans and felt the words bubble up in his throat.

“I know there’s nothing I can say that will make it better, but— if you want to keep—I dunno, being my friend at least, and maybe the rest of it, if you want, I promise I’m not a freak. This is just… the worst. It’s the worst thing about me.”

He meant the lying and secrets, but if she wanted to think it was about Dean, he couldn’t stop her.

She reached out and took his hand in hers, and he was so surprised he almost flinched. He stared down at them together, her pale fingers curling around his palm.

She said, “Family’s complicated,” which was the most generous interpretation of what was happening. 

He couldn’t say anything back. If he started talking on the subject of family’s complicated, he’d never stop. But she went on, rubbing little circles on the back of his hand with her thumb.

“You’ve had a really hard life, it sounds like. I can’t even begin to know what that was like for you. And you can tell me about it if you want, but you don’t have to. Whatever happened… you’re here now. I like that. I like you. I don’t care about the rest of it, but I know you’ve got nothing to be sorry for. These things just happen.”

“They really, really don’t.”

“Well. Maybe they do to you.” She sat back and tugged on his hand to make him look at her, his eyes meeting hers for the first time in what felt like forever, and it felt like getting flayed alive. Looking at someone who knew. “Maybe that’s who you are, and that’s okay. I still wanna get to know you.”

“Why?” he blurted out, desperate. “Jess. Come on.”

She shrugged, in a disarmingly Dean-like gesture.

“I like you. A lot. I didn’t start liking you because I thought it’d be easy. I’ve already had a lot of easy.” He heard her take a deep breath, and she sounded as nervous as he felt. “You are… a whole person. You’re vibrant, and interesting, and I love every word that comes out of your mouth. This is a lot, obviously, I’m not gonna lie. But I like you. You know?”

There was a love in there. Sam’s ears rung. 

“Jess…”

“I mean it. You know me. You have enough trouble shutting me up, I’d never say something I didn’t mean.”

“That can’t be true. You’re—you’re so cool, and smart, and beautiful, why would you—”

“So are you, if you haven’t noticed.”

He shook his head. He couldn’t look at her anymore so he looked down at their hands again. They looked nice together, he thought, his knobbly knuckles and her bony wrists. She was wearing a nearly invisible gold bracelet that glinted in the light.

“I don’t deserve this,” he said quietly. “I don’t know why you’re doing this.”

“I’m starting to learn that you’re a pretty bad judge of what you do and don’t deserve. So maybe just trust me on this one?”

He laughed and shook his head again. “You’re so weird.”

“Not as weird as you,” she said softly, and squeezed his hand. “I’ve gotta get ready for practice, but… can I see you later?”

He nodded hard. His throat felt tight. This was already unbelievable, more than he ever thought he’d get, he couldn’t ruin it by letting her know he was a crier.

He could breathe again once he was out in the hall. He gave himself a few moments outside his door, eyes closed, trying to slow his racing heart. The sun was coming up and the hallway was brighter, lit by a narrow window at the far end. His head was spinning with exhaustion and adrenaline as he opened the door.

Dean was laying in his bed, newly clothed in boxers and, in an appalling, God-awful, heart-rending move, Sam’s Stanford t-shirt, red text on gray.

“Oh my God.”

Dean sat up a little. He’d been laying on his back with his hands folded over his stomach like a corpse. The shirt was big on him. Sam felt like he’d been hit by a truck.

“What?” He saw Sam looking at the shirt. “Right, sorry. Mine was bloody. I didn’t see which it was ‘til I had it on.”

“It’s fine,” Sam said, code for let me keep you here and I’ll put you in my stuff every day, which he hoped Dean didn’t hear. He shut the door behind him and rubbed his face.

Dean asked, “How’d it go?”

Sam pulled off his shirt as he crossed the room and dropped it on the floor. He flopped face first on the bed next to Dean, half on top of him. 

“She thought I lied about you being my brother earlier so it wouldn’t hurt her feelings that my boyfriend was in town.”

Dean made a strangled noise. “Aw, shit.”

“Yeah.”

“So what’d you say?”

“I told her the truth. That you’re my brother, and we grew up weird and fell in love.”

Dean curled an arm around his shoulders and sighed, shifting over on the bed to give him more room. 

“And?”

“And she… said she likes me. She wants to make it work, I think.” He smushed his face into Dean’s chest, right in his armpit, and laughed. “What’s wrong with her that she’s willing to put up with me, right?”

Dean chuckled. He brushed the back of his knuckles over Sam’s cheek.

“I know you’re not gonna hear me when I say this, but you’re worth some baggage.”

“Some.”

“Okay, a lot of baggage.” Dean turned his head and pressed his face into his hair, still damp from the shower. “So you found a saint. Congratulations.”

When he hit his growth spurt, there was nothing he wanted more than to be bigger than Dean, and now that he was, he sort of wished he was still small. Dean used to be able to bundle him up in his arms completely, and now he was all limbs, but he still did his best.

He tugged on Sam’s jeans. “Take these off. Don’t live like me.”

Sam rolled onto his back, squirmed out of his jeans and kicked them to the floor, then tucked back in against Dean’s side.

Dean asked, “When’s your first class, you got time to sleep?”

“A little.”

Dean reached over his head and switched off the lamp. Sam closed his eyes and dug his cheek into his shoulder, slotted their legs together and breathed out, four counts, in four counts. He had a blinding headache, tired and dehydrated and going in manic circles around Dean, Jess, his life. He didn’t think he could ever sleep again, even as his bones ached with exhaustion.

“I’ll head out today,” Dean said.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. Gotta get back to Dad.” He kissed his temple. “You’ll be okay, Sammy.”

“You think?”

“I know. Take her out to dinner, don’t talk about me, and fuck her brains out. You’ll be fine.”

Sam snorted. “You’re a pig.”

“Yeah, but you love me.”

It didn’t come out as funny as he clearly meant it to. Sam burrowed closer into his side, he would have crawled inside him if he could. His shirt was soft against his face, under the arm thrown over his chest.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “So goddamn much, Dean. I don’t know what to do.”

Dean kissed his temple again, and left his mouth there.

“You’ll be okay.”

Sam leaned back until he could look at him, his cheek pillowed on his arm. He could see him in the light filtering in through the drawn curtains and he didn’t look like he thought either of them would be okay. He was an awful liar when it counted. He petted Sam’s hair back the way he’d done since before Sam could remember. He’d always done it without even thinking, it was just where his hands went.

“She doesn’t scare me,” Sam said quietly, like a confession. “Not the way you do.”

Dean laughed. It wasn’t nice. He turned his face and put his cheek against Sam’s head again.

“Yeah, well, maybe she shouldn’t. That’s good. I know you don’t wanna hear this, but—”

“I’m not gonna date someone just because you tell me to.”

“No, you’re gonna date her because I saw the way you looked at her. Give it a shot, Sammy. I’ll be fine.”

He felt like a traitor. He felt sick. More than before, more than getting on that bus, this felt like a goodbye. There would be phone calls, but the next time he saw him would be when he showed up at the apartment he shared with Jess to tell him that John was missing. It would be a while after that until they shared a bed again.

“I don’t—”

“You’re nuts about her, man. That’s okay.” Dean’s hand came up and squeezed his shoulder. “Love doesn’t have to feel like the fucking world’s ending. Sometimes you can just be happy.”

“Yeah?”

Dean sighed. He brushed Sam’s hair back again, and ran his fingers over the shell of his ear.

“So I’ve heard.”

 

 

Notes:

I don't think I've ever given the conversation of who tops as much emphasis in any other fandoms I've written for the way I do with these guys because I can't FATHOM them not arguing about it, at length, forever

my other spn fics, tumblr. again, thank you very much for all the kind comments.

Series this work belongs to:

• Part 4 of Fucked up family shit