Work Text:
The desert is depressingly huge. Maybe Sam thought it was beautiful, back when California was still this promisedland awaiting him if he just worked hard enough. A glowing mirage amid dead land, tumbleweed, sand, scrub brush. Something to save him from himself.
But now he knows he’s unsavable, that the whole thing is bullshit. That the desert is just the desert; it isn’t solace.
Sam’s been having a hard time thinking anything is beautiful lately, though. His forehead is pressed against window glass, eyes watching mile after mile of identical desert slide by. The creases of his body are sweaty and dappled with heat rash, and on top of all this, his brother is sitting in the drivers seat wearing a leather jacket.
“Dude. Can you please take that thing off? I’m gonna get heat stroke just looking at you,” he says, cringing as he tears his eyes away from endless desert and onto Dean, who’s pouring so much sweat he looks like he took a shower. His cheeks are apple-red, shiny and sunburnt. If Sam pressed his fingers into the glow of Dean’s face, the pressure would leave bloodless white imprints when he let go. But he doesn’t do that.
Dean grimaces. “Take what off?” he asks like it’s not obvious. A glistening trail of sweat slides down the back of his skull, through his hair, and into the collar of his jacket.
“Never mind,” Sam huffs, turning back to the dry sea of golden sand framing the infernally lonely road they’re hurtling down. It’s a safe thing to look at, barren and enormous and lifeless. Then Sam remembers that plenty of things live in the desert, sidewinders and buzzards and those burrowing beetles, and he feels trapped.
The quiet flounders and dies between them. “Your jacket,” Sam says stupidly, too late and irrelevant now, and Dean scoffs.
Sam expects a why do you care? or an eye roll at the very least, but Dean doesn’t do or say a damn thing. There’s rustling, his shoulders moving inside the leather like a pupa inside a cocoon. And Sam wishes his mind wasn’t so predictable, he wishes he wasn’t so irrevocably haunted by the past. But he is only human, so in spite of all his efforts not to, Sam thinks of all the skin Dean is hiding from him. The skin he remembers from years ago, from the summers of their adolescence when Dean walked around motel rooms in his stained boxer briefs slung low on his hips, sweating through them at the crease of his thigh. Sam thinks of the muscles in his brother’s then-young back, glistening and flickering like eyelids over dreaming eyes. He thinks of the old Dean, golden and confident and so brilliantly glowing that the whole rest of Sam’s teenaged world got edged out, chased into nonexistence by his brother’s flesh.
He rubs his hand over his face, trying hard to push back. Push it all away, out of the window and into the false dead of the desert so that he can breathe properly again. It works for awhile.
----
You’re sixteen and have poison ivy. You scratch in your sleep, crazy with it, unconsciously leaving raised red welts all over your forearms and lanky thighs that grew too fast for the rest of you to keep up with, valleys and ridges between the swollen bumps of rash.
Dad’s on a hunt he’s not talking much about. He dumped you and your brother at an old summer cabin of Caleb’s in Wyoming with a bomb shelter's worth of canned food and Dean’s sawed-off. Told you to practice shooting, practice fighting. Don’t get rusty while he’s gone. But it’s too hot to do anything but lounge around in front of the fan in a wet shirt. You’re bored to hell, pouring sweat and itching everywhere. At night you lie awake because it’s too hot to even sleep, tangled in an old, holy cotton sheet in the bed you’re sharing with your brother.
During the day you read books, classics on reading lists so you can be prepared for your junior year. Anna Karenina. The Awakening. The Great Gatsby. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Heart of Darkness. The Dubliners. Tess of the D’urbervilles. You thumb through the college guides that came in the mail for a friend of yours last year, fliers you swiped off his dining room table because you knew he wouldn’t notice and you needed them more than he did. You research these on the sly, because you’re not sure what Dean would say if he caught you.
You spend a lot of time avoiding your brother, at first. Dean’s the quiet kind of angry right now, still sullen and broken in invisible places from some fight he had with dad before he left. He goes running in the mornings before the sun comes up, and even though it’s cooler at dawn he still comes back slicked in sweat, his chest heaving, red splotched over his shoulders like the heat used fists on him. He drains his canteen without stopping, eyes closed and head thrown back, throat bobbing over and over again and you shut your eyes tight, break pencils to splinters because the way you look at him, the things you try not to think, are so fucked up. You spend a lot of time avoiding your brother, at first. You spend a lot of time rubbing your palm over your eyes until you see stars in blackness, something to get lost in that isn’t Dean.
You used to think it was just a little-brother thing. The complete lack of limits on your devotion to him. Just looking up to him because he raised you, was always there for you, held you through the nightmares and the fevers and the tantrums and the thunderstorms. But now you’re older, a teenager who knows better, and you hate him as much as you love him, and it still hasn’t gone away. It’s there at night, making your skin crawl, feeding the burn and the itch and the other things that belong to July.
You think the heat makes it worse. The heat and the loneliness, stuck in the middle of nowhere with nothing but your brother.
---
The Lucky Star Motel gives them a free room because the water heater is busted. Sam takes a cold shower as soon as they check in, his skin pebbling into gooseflesh under the cool spray, eyes shut against the din of it and Dean crashing around in the bathroom on the other side of the curtain. Sam feels too huge for the thing, feels like if he straightens out he’ll be able to see over the top of it and into the world, feels like if he steps wrong he’ll whack his head on the shower head. His cheeks feel hot in this unsootheable way, but he turns his face to the spray anyway. It clatters around his ears, so loud he almost misses Dean saying, “Hurry up in there. I’m practically burning the place down,” with his voice muffled around a toothbrush.
Sam shivers, clears his throat. “You could put your head under the sink tap. Or you know, take off your jacket.”
He thinks it’s been long enough since he last tried to coax Dean out of his jacket that Dean shouldn’t remember, shouldn’t be able to see the pattern, but he’s wrong and Dean calls it right away. “Dude. You’re so obsessed with my jacket. What’s your problem?”
The sound of this brother spitting into the sink. The walls closing in on Sam, the shower getting even smaller. “I just don’t want you to collapse from heat exhaustion. You know, normal people don’t even wear long sleeves in heat like this. Let alone long sleeves and jeans and a fucking ten pound leather jacket. I’m only worried for your safety,” Sam explains, his voice getting that grating little-brother sound it gets when he bitches at Dean. He’s glad it’s there, he has to sound irritated and concerned, rather than just concerned. Otherwise he gives this thing weight neither of them can endure.
Dean coughs, and Sam can imagine the expression his face is making, twisted mouth, wide eyes. He shuts off the water and stands dripping in the too-tight space. “What are you even talking about. Those dudes in the desert? The Lawrence of Arabia kind with the camels and shit? They definitely wear long sleeves. It protects them from the sun, dipshit.”
Sam waits, thinking that Dean’s gonna storm out of the bathroom so he can dry off alone, at least, but he doesn’t. He’s just standing there while Sam burns and freezes at the same time, guarding the safe middle ground between an enormous wet body and towels. Sam makes a face, annoyed. “That’s not why you do it. You do it because you’re weird,” he finally says, ripping back the curtain because he realizes on some level that if he wasn’t so stuck on Dean’s skin and everything that came along with it, he wouldn’t even be thinking about his own, and the towels, and the nakedness and all of that. It’s not like Dean hasn’t seen him naked in ten hundred different ways before this.
Dean looks at him with disgust, though, brows knit together and the stupid collar of that stupid jacket popped up. “Dude. I’m weird?”
Sam grabs a towel, and slings it around his hips. Dean’s eyes never leave his face, and it hits Sam hard that they’re both weird, both so fucking weird and fucked up because nothing is happening but they’re both so hyper aware, both so terrified by whatever it is in the room that’s making it feel like something could happen.
“You didn’t used to be like this,” Sam says stupidly, over his shoulder as he knocks out the bathroom door.
“What? Like what,” Dean snarls, eyes so bright and flashing with green he could start a fire with them.
Sam balks, stands there in a puddle of cold water. “Like...I don’t know. Self-conscious.”
“Self-conscious?” Dean asks, spitting the word out like he’s not even sure what it means because only thirteen year old girls are self-conscious or something. He looks absurd in his shirts and jacket and jeans and boots in the bathroom, who the fuck wears all that to the bathroom, Sam wants to ask him, who the fuck locks the door behind them before they get undressed to shower, who the fuck sleeps in their shoes and jeans, who the fuck is so afraid of being shirtless they let their favorite teeshirt get chlorine bleached from motel swimming pools?
Instead, Sam shrugs. “Dunno Dean. You used to show a lot more skin,” he says like it’s the easiest, simplest thing in the world.
Dean widens his eyes, flinches. Sam turns away, in nothing but his towel. “Shower’s free,” he adds.
---
You hate swimming with Dean because you used to love it. You used to love his big hands pushing your head under while you choked and squabbled with him. You used to love the way he’d balance you on his knee before launching you into the water. You used to love when he’d push you in, when he’d capsize your raft, when he’d pretend to be dead until you dragged him ashore and started freaking out and crying and then he’d laugh, pull you in to his pale, freckled chest and hold you there, your ear against his still beating heart.
It used to be this game, fun skirting along the edge of terror. You used to be thrilled to swim with Dean because it felt like this liminal space between life and death, breathing and drowning. It left you gasping, alive, in awe, shivering with the magic of having the best big brother in the world.
Now you know that you used to love it because something is seriously wrong with you. Because you’ve always felt more alive with his hands on you. You didn’t get it when you were a kid, because you were just a kid and kids don’t get shit like that. But now you do, and the whole thing seems dangerous now, dangerous without the fun of almost-dying.
Now swimming is hard because Dean is one of those rather-be-naked kind of guys. The kind that walks around shirtless without realizing he’s getting sunburnt or making people stare. He’s impossibly confident in his own skin, and it’s maddening. Not only because you have to look at him all the time, but also because it draws attention to the mortifying fact that you are the exact opposite. Everything about occupying your own body feels wrong, uncomfortable, dirty. Your body feels like a betrayal, this thing you’re stuck with that you abhor, that plots against you, makes you clumsy, has an allergic reaction to a fucking plant of all things. You’re long and gawky in all the wrong places, growing so fast it hurts at night. You always need new shoes, new pants, a haircut. You don’t fit into the places you used to. You’re not this little wimpy thing Dean can shove underwater before he saves it from drowning anymore, but you’re not strong, either.
You’re changing too rapidly to know your body, so it feels wrong. Messy. Uncontained, achey. And on top of all that, it also gets hard for your brother. What the fuck is up with that. Dean’s skin is so easy to be in, to look at. You hate it. You wish you could be like that, but you’re not. Dean has the privilege of being unaware, innocent, while you have to suffer stuck in this huge, swollen, itchy, painful new thing that used to be your body.
“Found a fresh spring a few miles away on my run this morning,” Dean says, throwing his disgusting sweat-soaked shirt on your face one morning, while you’re still half asleep. You scramble away from it, this cold wet thing that smells like salt and Dean and sorrow. “And it’s too damn hot. You should come with me.”
You stare at him, face pinched and eyes bleary. “What? Why?”
“Because it’s unhealthy to read that much, Sammy. You should enjoy the great outdoors. Get some fresh air.”
“Hippie.”
“Nerd,” he says, grinning one of those huge, sparkling grins with his teeth parted. He’s in a better mood, you notice, thrumming with energy and it makes him even more unbearably bright that usual, and you remember being a kid, being touched under the water by Dean’s hands, the cold, strong slickness of it all. “Please, Sammy?” he asks, putting his hand on your stomach.
You flinch, and cover it up with being a pissy teenager who doesn’t want to do anything instead of what you really are. “Ugh. But we have to walk?”
“Yeah, like, two miles. It’s nothing, dude. Plus, I need the company. Come on,” he says, hauling you physically out of bed, his hands hot on your already feverish skin. You shake him off. He touches you again. His hair is spiky and almost bleached blonde on the top from sun, and his cheeks are bright red. You stare at him and his effortlessly toned chest, his gym shorts with the hole in them revealing a spot of pale, hairy thigh. You feel helpless and sick and giddy all at once. You say no, and kind of hit him. But then you go.
---
It should be something that Dean backs off on, this whole issue, but he doesn’t let it go. Bull-dog stubborn, holding onto the thing with his teeth in it. He showers quick behind a locked door, then bangs out of the bathroom with dark, dripping hair and all his clothes on again. Sam knows the feeling of being still-wet in your jeans, and it sucks, but this is what Dean does. Has always done, since Sam came back from Stanford at least and they started sharing spaces again in that claustrophobic, maddening way.
“Are you happy?” Dean asks, throwing his leather jacket onto the foot of the bed where Sam’s still lying, spread out with his towel over his junk but his long legs sticking out, endless and brown because it only takes Sam three seconds in the sun to have this smooth, easy, burnless tan. “I took the damn jacket off. Since it was driving you so crazy or whatever.”
The leather slithers to the floor like an animal, smelling salty and old and sad and boozy, the ghosts of John Winchester still haunting his son. Sam watches it, shrugs. “You’re still wearing flannel over an undershirt. And Levis. And it’s still like one hundred degrees outside in the shade.” He notices that at the very least, Dean is barefoot.
“This is how I am. It’s comfortable,” Dean grunts, unzipping his duffle to pull out a gun to clean, something to get in his hands because Sam can tell he’s climbing the walls, he’s feeling pushed to the edges of the room by Sam’s body. Sam can tell because it’s the only place Dean’s not looking. And maybe Sam’s doing it on purpose, a little. Pushing Dean the way Dean used to push, edging sanity out with miles of goldenrod and sun and skin. Sam’s not sure what he’s doing, or why, or how far he intends to take it, but for now, he’s gonna keep pressing, picking at the perimeter of his brother’s scabs.
“How you are now,” he says, eyebrows raised.
Dean doesn’t look up, but his hands still on the oil cloth and barrel of his pistol, twitching like the last breath of something dying. “What?”
“It’s how you are now. But you didn’t use to be like that. You used to never wear clothes. You were shirtless like every freaking day unless it was freezing,” Sam explains. “And now you’re a prude. Just trying to figure it out.” Which is a lie because Sam already has it figured out. He knows exactly what changed between then and now. He knows all about young, innocent, teenaged Dean’s fall from ignorance down to this, leather jackets in summer deserts. He only wants Dean to figure it out, wants Dean to defend himself so Sam can invent new things, be proven wrong.
Dean shrugs, sweat spots already in the underarms of his flannel overshirt. Sam imagines putting his hands inside of it, under the layers and layers of fabric until he can dig his nails into salty, sweaty skin. He wants to push.
“I was a kid then,” Dean says, deciding against his gun and zipping it back up inside his duffel, hands slow and careful and unsure. “Got tired of getting sunburnt, I dunno Sammy. But now it’s different. I feel exposed otherwise, man, so I don’t think about it. It just feels right.”
This is more than Sam expected to come out so he stops for second, nods slow, lets his eyes crawl over Dean because sometimes it feels so stupid and pointless to stop himself from doing it when the intention is there, the desire and everything else save for the actual thing. He knows Dean’s thinner than he is, thinner and softer and more padded around the middle, paler and with strips of muscle that stand out in relief when he’s tense instead of all the time, like Sam, the forever promise of power and danger visible on his frame like a threat. Sam thinks of all that, hiding imagined under Dean’s clothes.
“You used to be the one who wouldn’t get caught with his shirt off,” Dean reminds him, cracking a grin like the room isn’t so wired with tension the air could shatter. “You were so scrawny. Dad gave you shit for it, always wearing shirts to swim in.”
Sam drops his eyes to his own flesh, the ladder of muscle on his stomach, the tawny hair under his navel. The body he had to make this way so that he could live inside of it. And he remembers with a blinding ferocity, and wonders if Dean’s remembering the same thing.
He rubs a hand through his hair, finds it still damp with cold water. He can feel Dean’s eyes on him, boring into his forehead and refusing to drop lower, so Sam sits up, forces himself into the line of his brother’s vision. “I’m not anymore.”
Dean takes a step back, his throat flickering. The air changes, feeling timeless and young like July. “What do you want Sammy, huh?” Dean says, voice scraping along blindly in the dark, hushed and low and terrified. “What the hell do you want? Want me to take my clothes off?”
And then the air is breaking. Pieces of summer sky are opening up in Sam’s chest and his insides feel too vast for his outsides, like he’s shattering his exterior, skin cracking and light filtering through to fill the room, chase Dean out. The shape of Dean’s mouth endures, gets soft and parted and so full of fear Sam can taste it, could drown in it. “This thing...Dean. It wasn’t your fault. What happened,” Sam mumbles, and he didn’t remember moving but he’s standing close to his brother now, holding the towel up to his body like the last white surrender flag between two warring armies.
Dean’s backed into the wall, sweating hard and Sam thinks of ripping buttons asunder, pushing the flannel over Dean’s shoulder and sinking his teeth into pale skin. He remembers sunscreen and teenage-perspiration, the silty organic smell of fresh water in Dean’s hair. He remembers Dean’s tongue in his mouth, Dean’s forever-desert of skin real under his own quaking palms.
“Tell me what you want, Sammy,” Dean says desperately, and Sam’s palm opens on the wall beside Dean’s skull.
---
You walk in the exact center of the path because any plant could be poison ivy, and you’re not taking any more chances. Dean’s like a dog, running out ahead of you and crashing off into the brush to retrieve things, a walking stick or a hubcap or a cat skull. “Look at this stuff Sammy,” he tells you, brushing dirt off it and shoving it in your face.
“Chevelle, 76 or 77,” he says.
“Someone’s pet. Probably died out here.”
You try and stay neutral, the safe gray space between lashing out in annoyance and humoring him completely out of this sick love you have for him, but it’s hard. He’s infuriatingly unclothed, peeling on the bridge of his nose and the sloping curve of his shoulders from days’ worth of sunburn, more freckled than you’ve ever seen him before and he looks young, a teenager, so you have to keep reminding yourself that he turned twenty this year, that he’s an adult now.
“How much longer?” you complain, rivulets of sweat coursing down your spine, poison ivy itching so bad you’ve given up on not scratching it so hard little beads of pink-orange lymph rise to the surface, bringing blood with them. The heat makes it worse, you think, meaning the itch, meaning Dean, meaning everything.
“We’re almost there dude, geez. How are you so out of shape?” he asks, green eyes squinting over his shoulder at you.
“I’m not out of shape. It’s just hot. Like, miserably, no-human-should-be-out-here hot.”
Dean actually laughs out loud at you. “You’re such a girl. It’s not that bad, and even if it was you’re probably dying because you have a black fucking shirt on. Why don’t you take your shirt off? You’re not gonna swim in that, are you?”
You shrug and knit your brows together, feeling stony and exposed because you were planning on swimming in your shirt. You’re silent for awhile, and the path gets narrower and sandier. Twigs brush against your bony naked ankles and you cringe, imagining all the new spots of rash you’ll have to rip open in a few hours.
You come to the spring, and it’s kind of beautiful. You weren’t expecting it to be like this, with the water dammed up by rocks on one side so there’s actually a pool to submerge in, dark green and bubbling under the shade of a dense, half-dead oak. It smells like wet granite and pine, wild and lonely and for a split second you’re glad you came with Dean, purely glad, without the mixed feelings.
But then the brief lapse in confusion is gone because Dean’s stepping out of his shorts, shimmying them down to his ankles into a puddle of navy blue on the scrubby bank of the stream, and you’re staring. The expanse of his flesh seems endless, the tan lines and shift from white to gold to red. It happens fast, and then your brother is naked and cannonballing into the deepest part of the water. It crashes up in a rooster tail over his head before he surfaces, eyes shut. His lashes, dark and curved, fit against his cheekbone in this impossible way and drips slide down his throat and you’re still staring so you tear your eyes away, fix them on the ground. Your cheeks burn, and Dean calls your name.
“Damn that’s cold,” Dean crows, dog paddling and shaking water out of his hair. “Come on, Sammy. You gotta jump in, otherwise you’ll never get used to it. Just bite the bullet.”
You stand on the edge, tottering clumsily, hair in your eyes. You try and imagine what it would feel like for things to be that easy, to just strip down to your skin and jump into the water in front of Dean without thinking about ten hundred different things, without being so aware of your body that it hurts for it to touch the air.
He swims to the edge and staggers out, dripping in cascades off his body. You know if you were a normal brother you’d tease him for having a small dick, because even though you’re not looking you know he must be shrunken up inside his body right now. You’re not a normal brother, though. You stand there, scratching your forearm, looking bewildered at Dean as he gets closer and closer to you with this determined look on his face.
“What are you doing?!” you ask too late, because he’s already on top of you. It shouldn’t shock you that he’s cold and wet but it does and you freak out, trying to scramble away and get an elbow in or something but Dean’s fought you too many times and he knows all your tricks. His face is in your neck, one of his hands fisting in the hem of your teeshirt, pulling it up.
“Making you more comfortable,” he says conversationally, arm flexing around your middle as he tears your teeshirt up over your head. “If you’re not gonna take care of this then I gotta,” he grunts, pushing his hips into your ass to keep you notched into place. You try and stay upright but you can’t, not with the reeling shock of him being so close, smelling so fiercely of Dean and Dean’s skin and Dean’s breath and Dean’s sweat and you buckle, panicked because what if you do something and he knows?
You fight manically, gracelessly as he gets his other hand inside your shorts and pulls them down, too, down around your knees trapping you and stealing your balance and you would fall over but he’s holding you up. “Such a little prude, Sammy,” he barks into your ear. And this is a game. It should be a game, it’s gotta be a game and you run through it in your head, imagining two normal brothers doing this, the big brother giving the younger one a hard time about his body, about being a wimp or a pussy or whatever, and holding him down and getting him out of his clothes as a game. For humiliation. You think it sounds normal, like something that could happen without it meaning anything so you don’t let your mind fantasize, you don’t let your hips cant away from him and thrust pathetically into empty air.
You’re naked then except for Dean holding onto you, steering you to the water and you scream and fight and laugh in huge sputtering gulps but he doesn’t stop until he’s dunked you both under the surface.
It hits you in the chest like an ice block, so cold it’s solid, painful. You flail away from him, giant limbs pinwheeling desperately through the water as you gasp. “What the fuck, Dean!?”
“I knew you wouldn’t come in unless I helped you,” he explains, grinning, swimming away from you easily. You’re still clumsy with the cold and the hungry confusion of your new, betraying body. Scrambling to the bank you sit there in the sand, desperately inhaling, watching water-skimmers skirt around on a puddle’s surface like they have somewhere urgent to go.
Your chest aches as you say, “I would have come in. Slower, maybe, and in my fucking shorts, but I would have come in.”
Dean shrugs, the water lapping around him, so dark his skin is marble white in contrast. “Wanted you right then.”
Your stomach plummets, ice in your veins, fire in your cheeks. You stand on wobbly legs, turning away from him. “I think there were better ways to go about that,” you say carefully.
Dean doesn’t hear you though, because he’s just slipped under the water.
---
Sam watches his brother’s mouth, the careful part of it, the softness of its corners as he swallows pointedly. Dean’s eyes are half-lidded. He’s Sam’s if Sam wants him, Sam can tell by the way he’s not fighting him, not throwing him across the room and going on and on about how he’s not gonna do that anymore, how he can’t, how he’s sorry, how it’s all his fault. Because that’s happened before. Sam knows the way Dean looks when he’s gonna let him take it.
Sam studies him, drunk on the power of having Dean here, for a second. Dean and his skin, Dean and things half remembered. His hand leaves the wall beyond his control, and presses a thumb into the terrified thrumming of Dean’s pulse. Dean’s eyes flicker close, his throat bobbing and face slack with awe and compliance and Sam wants so badly to kiss him. To stop trying to figure Dean out and figure out the complexity and speed and messiness with which Dean figures himself out and just say to hell with it. Fuck him up against the wall, suck bruises into his back, his shoulders, flesh otherwise hidden from him that will be hidden from him again because every time they do this, it doesn’t last.
He wants to and Dean’s gonna let him. He can tell.
But that will only last until they’ve both come. Sam knows, because this has happened before. The shit between them has shattered, they’ve come this far and gone farther but it always ends in the same ruins of self-recrimination, whiskey, and silence. Dean can’t handle this, what’s happening between them, what’s always happened between them because he thinks it’s his fault. He thinks this is because he messed up some summer when they were kids, when Sam was just a teenager who couldn’t exist in his own skin and instead sought solace in his brother’s. Dean thinks the only reason Sam wants this is because that summer fucked Sam in in the head, made him into this thing he wasn’t before because Dean’s never held still long enough to hear that Sam was always this way.
Sam can hear both their hearts beating. He watches Dean’s pupil-black eyes flick down to his lips before they swing up again to look him in the eye, and if he stays like this it’s gonna be that mess all over again so he stops. Vaults himself up off the wall and takes Dean with him, grabs him around the shoulder and wrestles him, easy, to the ground.
“Fuck, Sammy,” Dean grinds out, face in the carpet, because maybe he still thinks this is gonna be sex. Sam’s not all the way sure it isn’t gonna be or that it isn’t already, because where’s the line in something like that? When does wanting to fuck your brother stop being just want and become the actual thing, if you’re gonna be guilty your whole life and go to hell over it just the same, either way? He puts his face in Dean’s neck like a memory, breathing him in, forcing one huge, hot palm under all of Dean’s shirts. “What are you doing? You sonofabitch, are you gonna...”
“Why don’t you ever let me look at you,” Sam says hoarsely, pulling at cotton and flannel until he hears buttons pop. Dean struggles, pushes his hips into the motel carpet and Sam hauls him up off of it so he’s on his knees. He gets half his flannel shirt off; Dean’s left arm is still trapped in fabric and his eyes are wide, blown huge and scared and hungry as Sam’s hands fit themselves under, up on his chest and his sternum where his skin is fire-hot and damp. “Get to look at me all the time. I never get to look at you.”
Then, then finally the thing is off, leaving Dean in his white cotton Fruit of the Loom V-neck and christ, he looks like a whole new person already. Pale and startled and vulnerable, splayed out in a panicked tangle under his brother, fighting but only half-heartedly, looking so strange and small with his arms showing. Sam presses his mouth to the inseam of Dean’s arm, the junkie vein pulsing in the crook of his elbow and Dean gasps, stills while Sam sucks into him. It’s only then that Sam realizes his towel has been long forgotten, leaving him broad and naked and on top of Dean. He doesn’t care. He flips Dean over, amazed by how pliant he is, how little he’s fighting and he wonders Was I like that? Was I so obvious? Did I care so little?
Half-hard and straddling Dean’s thick thighs, he fumbles with his brother’s belt, his Levis. They come off easy, leaving red friction burns on Dean’s pale hips. Sam pushes up his teeshirt, puts his hands all over his brother. Slats his fingers into his ribs, up over his shoulder, his clavicles. Dean lies there destroyed. Passive, chest heaving and eyes closed, heart a thunderous thing. He lets Sam touch him, he’s visibly hard in his boxers, dampening the grey fabric where it’s pressed tight over the head of his dick.
“I love seeing you like this,” Sam breathes almost without meaning to, his own dick twitching against Dean’s abdominal muscles, hands heavy and insistent.
Dean scoffs, rolls his head against the carpet so he doesn’t have to look straight at Sam. “Is it what you remember?” he says after awhile, swallowing audibly.
Sam shakes his head. “No. You were tanner back then. And your shoulders weren’t this broad,” he explains, sliding hungry, rough palms up Dean’s arms, to the junction of his neck. “And you didn’t know. What it did to me. You didn’t know anything.”
“I’m sorry,” Dean says on autopilot as his eyes darken, his response to everything. Sam digs his nails in, puts his hands in Dean’s hair.
“No, quit. Stop. You’re so stupid. You think this is all because of something, but it’s not because of anything,” Sam says, clumsy. He lets go of Dean and reaches for his shirt, pulling the white cotton over his head, marveling at the way Dean’s stomach has to tense and spasm to hold himself up off the ground. Dean collapses back down, stuck in his flesh, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else, like he’d rather crawl inside of Sam’s body and die there. “I just want you. I just do. I always did, even before that time.”
“Don’t say that,” Dean hisses.
“It’s the truth,” Sam fires back.
Dean wilts and writhes under him, trying to disappear. On some level it makes sense, because Sam remembers what it was like, the guilt and the shame of being in love with this brother, of changing and feeling impure, of blaming his flesh for all the sick, filthy things that kept him up at night.
In comparison to Sam, Dean’s small. Pale, soft, sinewy rather than built. He’s conscious of his flesh because he sees it as something that fucked Sam up, made him run, killed his innocence. But he’s wrong.
Sam bends and fixes his mouth to Dean’s throat. Dean shudders under him, his hands becoming fists between their bodies.
---
At the edge of the water, the shock wears off and your body decides it’s not as cold as it initially thought. It seems pointless to sit here naked on the bank watching Dean, especially with the sun beating down relentlessly and drying the scattering of drops on your shoulders so you give up and wade in. Dean looks pleased, all smug smiles and too many freckles and you splash him, thankful for the water as you submerge because it covers you in dark and you don’t have to think about your body anymore.
Your brother slides past you, skin brushing against skin. It feels strange in the cold, slippery and alien and far away, like if you grabbed him you couldn’t keep him against you because the stream would carry him away. You dunk under the surface, reprimanding yourself for thinking about grabbing him in the first place. You kick through the water, bumping blindly into flesh because Dean is inescapable. You come up, gasping.
“Nice, huh? Aren’t you glad I dragged your ass up here?” He asks you. He reaches for the top of your head, tangles his hand in the dark wet mop and you think he’s gonna push you under, just like when you were kids, but he doesn’t. His palm just stays there, rubs down your neck. You shrugs him off, heart rabbiting.
“It’s pretty nice, yeah.”
You both tread water, looking at each other, and the summer seems infinite.
It’s too much and you kick away, up to the bank where you scramble ashore. Dean’s still in the water you try and forget that you don’t have clothes on. It feels weird and surreal to be naked out doors, in nature, and you try and embrace the weirdness for a little longer. You flatten out your shirt on the sand and lie down, stretching out on your back so the sky and the tops of the trees comes into too-bright focus. Idyllic blue like glass, a choppy horizon of pine. You think about how this couldn’t be happening if Dad were here, or if it was the school year. This kind of escape is only possible alone and in the summer, when things are timeless, outside of time, beyond time. Stretching on and on like melted crayon.
You hear Dean splash out of the water and collapse beside you, and the whole of your body becomes ratcheted with tension, your skin prickling up into gooseflesh. You lie side by side for a long time without saying anything. A breeze rustles through the trees and twigs snap, but aside from that there is nothing but silence. The water evaporates off your body and you feel impossibly warm again, crowded and diminished by the vastness of your brother.
Dean rolls over and props himself up on his elbow eventually, and you shut your eyes tight against the sun to prevent yourself from having to look at him all wet and sunburnt and golden beside you.
“You’ve changed a lot. Don’t get to see you like this much anymore,” he mumbles, and it’s not what your expecting, not at all.
“What?” you say, keeping the panic down in your voice and willing yourself to stay neutral, unfazed, normal. Dean’s eyes burn into you and you try and figure out if this, too, is something that happens between brothers that aren’t you and Dean.
“Just, you’re tall. And broad. Look like a Winchester now, instead of a toothpick. You’ve been eating your spinach or something,” Dean explains further, and you have to open your eyes, then, squint against the glare and bring your knees together to hide yourself because Dean’s just looking at you, just leaning there assessing all the changes in this prison of flesh and that’s basically hell, pretty much the first thing on a list of things you never want to do.
“Shut up,” you say, quick, lines through your brow.
“Just saying, Sammy.” Dean’s gaze is distant now, somewhere that isn’t your body and isn’t your eyes. You will you breathing to slow, your heart to resume its resting pace. “You’re growing up,” Dean adds.
Ice in your gut again. You twist onto your side, away from Dean, but he puts and hand on your ribcage and rolls you back the way he wants you. “Will you quit being so weird about it?”
I’m being weird about it? You thinks desperately, trying to keep your mind parched free of all the ways you wants to touch your brother back. “Dude. I’m not being weird, you’ve been man handling me all day,” you remind him.
He shrugs, like, point taken, then lets go of you and grins a horrible, skeezy grin.
“And when did this happen?” He says, gesturing to your junk. “You’re packing like, seven inches soft, dude. That’s insane.”
The world is reeling. Sky blending into trees blending into water all blending back into Dean, white straight teeth and plush chapped mouth and everything so fucking easy, effortless, skin and sun and words and everything. You wrench away from him, all pretense gone as the color rises fiercely in your face. “Jesus, Dean, will you stop?! I feel like a piece of meat or something. I don’t want to talk about my body like I’m some puberty special in biology class.”
Dean shakes his head. “It’s a natural, beautiful thing, Sammy.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hey. Here. Look,” Dean says, and does an impossible thing. Parts his thighs and palms his dick. Soft, circumcised. “You gotta be bigger than me. So what’s there to be ashamed about?”
Your heart thunders against your chest, eyes fixed on Dean’s dick because you can’t not, because he’s here, offering it to you, telling you to stare when it’s all you try not to do every day when he kicks his clothes off to shower, when he changes in the kitchen in front of you, when he walks around naked because it’s supposedly too hot...but here it is. Here he is, studying your face as you study his dick, the weight and thickness of it close to yours but the skin darker, the length shorter. You lick your lips, breath coming out short. “Yeah, maybe,” you hear yourself saying, hoarse. And maybe you’re letting this happen. Maybe you’re letting Dean and all his ignorance fuck with your head because you’re sick of fighting it.
“Make it hard. I wanna see how much you grow or of you’re just a shower,” Dean says, laying back and propping his head up with his forearm. Pieces of sunlight fall across his pale chest, and he jerks himself off slow, lazy, unconscious like he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
“What? No. I can’t make myself hard here with you looking,” you say breathlessly, thinking that this would never happen during the semester, Dean would never lie spread out and lazy like this next to you any other time. You feel outside the world, in a different plane of existence where this is okay and normal because you have’t seen anyone okay or normal for days, weeks. It’s just you and Dean, in this cabin in Wyoming, stuck in your skins, with nothing but the other to hold as a north star and follow home and what the hell are you supposed to do? How the hell are you supposed to breathe?
“Yes you can,” Dean scoffs. “You’re sixteen. Everything makes you pop a boner when you’re sixteen.”
You can feel his breath on your lips and it’s making you insane. You shouldn’t be attracted to the way your brother’s breath smells; you’re supposed to have that chemical or that hormone or whatever that prevents you from wanting to make out with siblings, but here you are, wanting him, like you always have, at least subconsciously. Your hand finds your dick.
“See,” Dean breathes, and you’re not sure what that means.
Your dick is twitching, definitely getting hard because Dean’s staring at you, eyes roving over your body ceaselessly, shamelessly. You don’t know what any of this is. If it’s something normal brothers do, or if Dean is as fucked up as you are, or if you’re so fucked up you only think he is because you want him to be. You jerk your dick, roll your hips into it and he watches you, eyes flickering with something and you want to lick into them to find out what it is.
“Hard enough?” you ask, opening your palm to show him your dick at its full length, leaking precum onto your fingers.
“Pretty damn big,” he says, hand still working between his thighs. You watch him, transfixed by the way he keeps licking his lips, by the spots of color in his cheeks and the involuntary muscle spams in his arms, his stomach.
“Lemme see,” you say, thoughtlessly touching his thigh before snatching your hand back, shocked at yourself for doing that.
He doesn’t freak out though, just smiles and says, “Why, so you can rub it in that you’re like, a centimeter bigger?”
You shrug, mouth dry, hip grinding into your shirt on the ground, dick hard and heavy and doing things to your judgement. “No, just want to see,” you say stupidly, and all the humor goes out of Dean’s face and is replaced with darkness.
“Yeah?” he asks, shifting closer for a second before shifting back, his hand stilling on his dick to squeeze while it pulses, and you want to badly to just put your mouth there, to bend at the waist and lick the head of your brother’s dick clean, and you don’t even care anymore, it’s summer and it’s hot and civilization is so far away it could be forgotten.
You nod, and slides his hand down, holds his dick a the base for you to see the whole thing, the glistening dark red, the shine of precum, the swollen heaviness of it. Your stomach flips over, clenches in too many places and it almost hurts. You’re jerking yourself off again now, hard, almost rolled over onto your stomach right now and thrusting into the ground you want him so bad.
You’re both quiet for a few seconds, not sure what’s going on. Then he breaks the silence with a weak, reedy voice, making you wonder if you’ve imagined this whole thing. “Hey, what’s all this?” he asks you, gesturing to your lower back, the angry smattering of raised red bumps climbing your spine.
“Oh,” you say, breath coming out uneven and in gasps. “Um, poison ivy. I’ve had it for days, that’s what I’m always complaining about,” you explain stupidly. He nods, frantic, fast.
“It itches?”
“Yeah. Like a motherfucker,” you say. And maybe he needed an excuse to touch you or something, because there’s his hand, his dirty nails, scratching all over your back and up between your shoulder blades.
“Fuck,” You gasp, dick smearing precum against the black cotton of your shirt.
“Is that good?” He asks, and you catch his eyes, the impossible crystalline green of them so bright and youthful he looks like a child, so young, younger than you. And then he’s just touching you with his palm rough and clumsy, straddling your back with his head pressed into the nape of your neck. “Sammy,” he breathes, jacking his dick off still, the head of it infernal and perfect above the muscles working in your back. You arch up, trying to touch him. “What’s happening?” he asks, mouth opening on your skin.
You writhe under him, bucking into your shirt, not believing that this is real but riding it out all the same. He tucks his hips, rubs his dick against your back and it feels so hot, so hard, and you moan brokenly, grabbing his taut forearm with your free hand.”Dunno.”
“S’okay?” he asks, face in your hair, inhaling desperately.
“Yeah,” you say, pushing your ass up between his thigh. “Come on me, Dean,” you beg, jerking off hard, wanting to purely to feel him spill all over your back you feel like you’re made from it. “Please.”
He bites your neck, licks up sweat and stream water and holds onto your ribcage with bruising grip. The air smells like fire for a second, burning oak and a dry, hot wind, and then he’s coming all over you, painting your spine in come and you follow, pumping yourself dry out onto your shirt.
He collapses on top of you, hands still roving across your skin and you fight to get out from under him. You can’t breathe and you feel weak with disbelieving, gasping and heaving and burning up inside.
“Dean,” you mumble, pushing him off you and onto his back, dead pine needles and dirt and other organic matter sticking to his sweat damp skin. “What the fuck.”
He covers his eyes, rubbing his palms into them, come all over his stomach and his spent dick. You rise to shaking arms, crawl over to him. “Look at me Dean, seriously.”
His eyes slide to yours, still sex hazy and shocked. Then his hand is in your hair and he’s kissing you, tongue in your mouth and over your teeth and you’re shaking in his arms, in your own skin, amazed that your body is an okay place to be if Dean’s touching it, fucking it, looking at it. You both break apart to suck in air.
He drags his hands down your sides, leaving pink marks with the force of his grip. “You’re so hot,” he says finally, easily, like it’s a something a normal brother says. You push your forehead into his, and pant.
---
Sam licks salt away from his brother’s adam’s apple, mind cloudy and sick with how quickly their veneer of normal is dissolving into nothing. He cards his hand through Dean’s hair, pushes their stomachs skin to skin. “Before that summer, Dean, I thought about this. I thought about you. You didn’t put the idea in my head or anything,” he says low, rough against Dean’s jaw. “Do you think you did?”
“Sam,” Dean breathes, grinding against him, hands locked on his shoulders in a half-decision to push away. “You were just a kid,” he mumbles, still resisting the idea while his body relents. Sam bites down, gets his teeth deep in his brother’s throat until Dean shudders, cries out with his eyes closed.
“Yeah but I wanted you. M’all fucked up over you, always have been. You gotta let it go,” He holds Dean down but Dean has stopped struggling. He’s looking up at Sam with eyes blown apart in darkness, passive and relenting, shaking and spasming but not fighting. Sam rubs his thumb over Dean’s lips, parting them, touching the slick inside of his brother’s cheek until Dean whines involuntarily, eyes sliding shut. Sam ruts into Dean’s hip, drunk on the feeling of his brother’s skin, all of the things summer warm and kept from him.
“Can’t do this, Sammy,” He whispers once Sam stops touching his mouth.
“Why not?” he whispers back, voice harsh. “Lotta stuff we shouldn’t do but we do anyway. No one has to know. Just another fucked up thing to add to the list.”
Dean shakes his head, rubbing his cheek into the carpet, pushing his forehead up to meet Sam’s. “Because,” he says. Because you’re my brother. Because you always leave. Because I’m older than you, so even if this isn’t on me, it’s still on me. Because I want you, and every time I have something I want it’s something the bad guys use against us. Because we just can’t, Sammy. Sam hears it all even though Dean doesn’t say it, because he knows. He’s heard it before, he’s had the same thoughts, he’s fought them and wondered them and feared them. He mouths along Dean’s cheekbone, exhales into his mouth and Dean inhales, taking him inside his lungs, dragging him with him.
“I don’t care,” Sam finally decides, his lips against Deans, his words falling into his brother. “Your skin isn’t yours, it never has been. It’s mine. So I should have the rest of you, too.”
And then Dean’s tongue pushes into his mouth, while Sam surges around him like the tide. They kiss hard, deep, drowning in pain and sweat and longing. Sam thumbs into Dean’s biceps, past layers of muscle and sinew, feeling tendons taut and twitching inside of him. And Dean’s kissing back, recklessly, hungrily. Pulling Sam’s hair in thoughtless, lost handfuls. Canting up into Sam’s solidity, letting himself be small and weak beneath it, giving up the battle against his flesh.
They break. Sam tastes iron in his brother’s spit, feels his dick twitching, close to orgasm against the infernal pressure of their bodies combined even though Dean hasn’t even touched him with his hands, his mouth. Dean makes noises, convulses like he’s not himself, because he’s beside himself. He’s Sam’s, he’s Sam, the same flesh and blood and scars and sadness, the same history with its black stains. “Always wanted this,” Sam tells him in his ear once he’s flipped him over to thrust against his ass, nudging up against the hole slick with spit and sweat. Dean’s quaking under him, arms tense and shuddering as he holds himself up. “Want it still. You just gotta let me.”
Dean comes into Sam’s fist and crumbles to a pile of self-loathing. Sam follows him down, fucks himself long and slow against Dean’s back and ass until he comes right up against Dean’s asshole, teeth in his shoulders, other hand in his hair. Then he lies there, on top of him, keeping him in place because he thinks Dean might leave if he moves. Run away, edged out completely, pushed to his limit, another universe. But Sam won’t let him. He’s gonna keep him here. His body. His skin. His own.
Dean’s breathing makes their bodies rise and fall in tandem, and Sam watches the color from his cheeks fade from a desperate, hungry red into pink. He pressed his fingers into the flush, leaves ephemeral bloodless white marks when his fingers leave. Dean smiles weakly, and opens his eyes into watery slits of green. “Hey. You can get off.”
“I don’t want you to book it,” Sam says honestly.
Dean grimaces. “Not gonna. Gonna stay. Promise. Just need to breathe, Sammy.”
Sam can hear the truth in his voice so he shifts carefully, warily. Dean takes a deep breath and remains, hands still on Sam’s skin. That’s something, Sam thinks, and eventually says, “You know. Some animals, they fuck their siblings. You have to separate brother and sister puppies when they reach maturity so they don’t breed with one another.”
Dean’s quiet for a thoughtful moment, and they both stare at the pockmarked ceiling, chests heaving and skin cooling. “Yeah but we’re humans, not dogs,” Dean says after awhile. Sam glances at his brother to catch lines through his brow and eyes black with pupil.
“Humans are animals, Dean,” Sam mumbles, still touching Dean’s shoulder, his ribs, his flesh in all its shameful planes and expanses. Dean lets him even as he adds “I’m just saying that it’s not like this is unnatural. You’re human. You have a body, you just do, you can’t help it. Ignoring it isn’t gonna make it go away. So you should let me touch it, because I want to.”
Dean scoffs, a half laugh, half bark. But he doesn’t move. Sam’s heart beats hard, waiting and so very in love with his brother.
“Yeah. Okay. Maybe,” is what Dean says when he finally answers. And it’s not perfect, but it’s something. He lets Sam kiss him for awhile, slow and deep with his lips soft and careful, ways he’s never kissed Dean before because he didn’t have the time.
Eventually he has to get up to clean himself off, the itchy trails of white on his abdominals. When he comes back from the bathroom, he finds Dean still in his boxers, pale torso exposed to the room, to Sam’s gaze. “What’re you looking at?” Dean says gruffly, and Sam is shocked to find something beautiful.