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Dean doesn't smoke. Never did.
Smokers tend to believe they can hide their habit with mouthwash and cologne, but they're delusional. The stink of it clings to fabric, skin, and hair, weeps out of pores, a foul miasma. Sam is certain that Dean has never smoked. He is intimately familiar with the scent of his brother, given they grew up in each other's skin, sharing clothes, beds, car benches. As a child, his scent was calming to Sam, though he would never admit it. In a never-ending rotation of motel rooms and rented apartments, one of the only sensory constants in his life was his brother. He always liked it when their sheets stopped smelling like strangers and off-brand detergent and started smelling like them. Sam was a weird kid.
It's strange, then, that Dean is sitting in bed holding a crumpled pack of cigarettes. Sam trained himself to mimic his own deep sleep breathing when he was a kid, and it's come back to him like loading a gun or presenting a fake badge with confidence. Dean thinks he is asleep, and for some reason he is using this lonely witching hour to hold a pack of cigarettes.
Dad smoked, sometimes. Not a lot. One after a bad hunt or when he was the sloppy kind of drunk. Marlboro reds. Same as the pack Dean is holding.
They must be dad's, Sam decides.
Why would Dean be holding them? He can't quite make out Dean's face in the dark, but he's fairly certain he's just staring at them. It's a little eerie; he is perfectly still, breaths so shallow his chest barely rises, something about him not all there. How long has he been sitting there like that?
In the morning, while Dean is showering, Sam rifles through his bag for the cigarettes.
There they are. Dad's, undoubtedly. One flipped filter down for luck. A peculiar habit for the human equivalent of a house of mirrors, all shattered. There's five left and the butt of one stuffed in the bottom. Weird. It reeks. Why would he keep a smoked cigarette? Sam tips it into his hand and is startled to see what looks like blood staining the paper. Not the filter end, not like he had a split lip when he smoked it.
He quickly puts the carton back when he hears the water shut off and sits on the couch like he's been engrossed in the morning talk show while Dean was showering.
Sam can't find his tie. Dean only owns one.
He digs through dad's duffle, because they have dad's duffle. Dean didn't say a word when he took it from dad's truck and put it in the Impala. He's driven hundreds of miles with it taking up space. Sam gets it, kind of. Dad's dead and burned, and Dean carries parts of him in mourning. It makes the car feel like a hearse.
Dean catches him and explodes like a supernova. He sees the tie in Sam's hand and snatches it from him, then shoves Sam hard on the chest.
"Don't fucking touch it," he hisses through clenched teeth.
"Dude, what the hell?"
"Stay out of my shit."
"It's dad's shit, not yours. I need a tie."
"Not this one."
He puts it away and zips the duffle up. He snatches the keys from Sam's hand as he storms back into their room.
Sam buys a tie from a thrift shop. Dean never mentions it again, and Sam doesn't touch dad's duffle. He is not afforded the privilege of coffin bearer.
Sam has not seen Dean in less than a t-shirt and boxers since he joined him on the road again. Dean used to walk around nude, after showers or when it was too hot, comfortable in his skin in a way that drove teenage Sam mad with envy. Sam had been much, much thinner before he left for college, all bony angles and gangly limbs. Dean skipped over the awkward part of puberty entirely. He isn't vain by any stretch of the imagination, but he's never had to experience shame about his appearance, and it manifested in complete ease with his body.
Dean locks the door when he showers now.
Michigan. A werewolf. Dean gets mauled.
His chest is gouged with deep claw marks but he's fighting Sam over his attempts to stitch him up.
"I can handle it!" Dean protests, weakly shoving Sam away. Weak, because of the blood loss and exhaustion.
"Would you just let me help you? Christ, Dean, I've been patching you up since I was ten years old."
"I don't need you to-"
"I will tie you down if I have to, don't think I won't."
Dean stays silent and unresisting as Sam cuts off his tattered shirt, but he is so tense that touching him is like touching marble and Sam can almost hear his jaw creaking. He cleans his wounds as gently as he can and Dean doesn't make a sound. He's always handled pain far too well from far too young an age. It's a badge of honour for Dean, one that has always made Sam nauseous. His brother has always taken pride in the very things that cause Sam distress: his pain tolerance, his capacity for violence, the ease with which he fits in with the dregs of society.
It's only after, when Sam has stitched his wounds and is cleaning the blood from his skin, that Sam sees them.
Little round puckered scars. Three of them. Just below his right collarbone, forming a triangle with about an inch of skin between each one. Fairly new looking, bright pink and shiny.
Sam remembers the blood stained cigarette butt and feels like he's going to throw up.
"Dean-"
"No," Dean snaps, standing up and crossing the room to his duffle. He yanks a shirt on.
"Did he-"
"Shut up, Sam."
"You can't just-"
"I said shut up!" Dean yells.
Dean swallows a few painkillers with whiskey and goes to bed. Sam methodically packs away the med kit.
A week later. They're lying in separate beds and neither is pretending to sleep.
"It wasn't like that," Dean says quietly into the eigengrau. Sam stays silent, can tell there's more stuck on his tongue and doesn't want him to swallow it. "I asked him to."
Sam turns to face him. Dean doesn't move, stays on his back, hands folded on his stomach. Corpse-like.
"What?" Sam asks, timid in the anticipation of some terrible revelation.
"He wouldn't hurt me."
"He burned you."
"I asked him to," Dean repeats.
"Why would you do that?"
And why would dad do it?
"I wanted him to."
Dean turns over, back to Sam, and Sam turns his words over in his mind again and again and again.
Now Sam knows that the scars are there, he notices that Dean touches them all the time. Mindless fingers seek them out and press and rub, like worrying a rosary. He does it when he's nervous, mostly, like there is relief to be found in their memory.
Sam doesn't understand. He used to understand his brother, but that was before. Three years of separation and Sam barely recognises Dean any more. On the surface, he's exactly the same, but Sam spent most of his life in Dean's pocket and he knows the man sitting beside him is not the same brother he left.
What could have possessed him to ask dad to burn him with a cigarette? Why on earth would dad do it? Were they drunk? Was it some weird game?
Dean stoically shoulders pain like the man dad raised him to be before his voice even broke. He doesn't seek it out. Was it some kind of test?
Why does Dean ghost his fingers over the burns with solemn reverence when he thinks Sam isn't looking?
Why does he smile when he touches them sometimes?
Sam wanders into the front office while Dean's booking the room and catches the clerk asking, "Where's your fella?", at the exact moment the door chimes to announce Sam.
Dean stiffens and glances back at Sam, head whipping back to the woman who has her plucked-thin eyebrows raised as she gives Sam a once over.
"Didn't work out?" she asks.
"This is my brother," Dean says, a non-sequituer to Sam, but her eyes soften and she nods as if in understanding. She passes them the key.
"Unless you want room 108-"
"This is fine. Thanks."
Sam walks down to room 108 and peers through the window. One king size bed. Mirror on the ceiling.
He goes to the front desk and the same woman is there, flicking through a magazine and chewing gum. She looks up when Sam enters.
"You're Dean's brother," she says, weird inflection on the word brother.
"Yeah. So, you know him?" he asks with casual inflection, picking up a pamphlet for a local flea market and pretending to be interested.
"I do. He dealt with our ghost hooker problem 'bout a year ago. Him and his partner." She chews her gum loudly even as she speaks, and Sam watches it stretch between her teeth and drop to her bottom molars in a wet, fleshy looking chunk with more than a little disgust.
"Partner?"
"The big guy. Granted, not as big as you. Beard, scar on his cheek, ring a bell?"
She's talking about dad. There's that dreadful anticipation again, wrapping around his organs like barbed wire.
"Uh, yeah. John."
"John, yeah, that was his name. How's he doing?"
"He's dead."
Her face falls. "Oh, I'm sorry. I don't know if you knew him, but Dean, he was awful sweet on him. Not for me to judge, I don't care which way folks swing, I did worry a little 'bout how much older he was, but way he was with Dean, well, I know true love when I see it. Damn shame. He was a good man." Sam can't speak. His mouth is open. He tries to close it but it doesn't cooperate. The woman's eyes widen with understanding, or what she thinks is understanding. "There I go, runnin' my damn mouth again. Shit, I take it you didn't know your brother was - well, he ain't gay, I seen him eyeing up my housekeeper, Miranda, but he and that fella of his, you didn't know 'bout them?"
"Sorry, I've gotta..."
Sam turns tails and manages to get ten feet from the office before he throws up. He wipes his mouth with the flea market pamphlet.
He doesn't mention it to Dean.
What would he even say? That a motel clerk assumed he and dad were - were -
He was awful sweet on him.
Room 108. King size bed. Mirror on the ceiling.
Cigarette burns on Dean's chest. The cigarette butt kept like a memento, a talisman, a sordid keepsake.
Dean goes to a bar and leaves the car in the lot. He doesn't ask Sam to go with him, never does. Sam gets dad's duffle out and searches through it for an answer.
The tie that Dean wouldn't let him use is just a tie. Navy blue, cheap, a little ragged and stretched out.
Clothes, books, toiletries. The same things Sam carries in his bag. There's a mostly empty bottle of KY in the toiletries bag but that's nothing, it's just lube, even his dad found time for sex between hunts. It doesn't mean--
Sam checks all the pockets. There's no condoms. Dad drilled into them the importance of safe sex. Maybe he just ran out.
He finds an envelope and opens it. There are eight polaroids inside. He lays them out on the bed, one by one, his heart climbing higher in his throat with each one. He can't breathe. He can't make what his eyes see make sense.
Dean. All Dean.
Dean wearing that leather jacket dad gave him, the same one he wears every day even now, only he doesn't have anything else on. He's sitting on a nondescript motel bed, leaning back on his hands, head tilted back, eyes teasing, lips parted as if he's saying something.
Dean with his hand around his dick, head thrown back in ecstacy, other hand pinching one of his dusky nipples. It's a pose straight out of a seedy skin mag elevated by the ethereal quality of Dean's heaven-sent beauty, those delicate features, that summer blessed skin.
Dean on his back, the photo taken from above, from the position of someone straddled over him. He's laughing, green eyes bright and crinkled, as carefree as Sam's ever seen him. There's a thick-knuckled, veiny hand on his chest. A hand wearing a wedding ring that Sam would recognise anywhere.
Dean sucking two fingers of that hand between his slick cherry lips, expression gone wanton and needy, eyes heavy-lidded but still glimmering with delight. He always knew how to weaponise his beauty.
Dean with his eyes closed and mouth open in bliss, the back of his knees just visible on the edges of the frame. There's fresh suck marks on his neck. No scars on his chest. His skin is luminous in the piss yellow glow of a lamp, the lustre of exertion, of pleasure.
Dean looking directly into the camera, that ringed hand on his throat. He looks like he's in heaven, like he couldn't want for anything but the breath to be choked from him.
The second to last photo is the most explicit one of the lot. Dean's body from the chest down, his legs spread wide around the body between them, his dick hard against his stomach, and lower down, a thicker, darker dick half-buried in his ass. Sam's eyes skip over it like a stone in a lake. Dean taught him how to do that when he was eight. Never could get as many bounces as Dean.
The final photo is taken by Dean, his arm outstretched, angled down to capture the nail in the coffin of Sam's doubt. Dean is lying with his head on a hairy, broad chest, his expression the same one he would have when he came back from hookups: sated, satisfied, a little smug. Dad's looking down at Dean with a fond smile, something so soft for something so grotesque.
Sam doesn't hear the door opening.
He's yanked by the back of his collar and thrown into a wall, and Dean's arm comes up to bar across his chest, his face snarling inches away.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?" he growls.
Sam can't speak. He just stares at Dean, at his face contorted by rage, but as he looks he sees the fear and panic simmering below his fury. The longer he stays silent, the more scared Dean looks. He backs away suddenly, grabbing the polaroids and shoving them into his pocket.
"Dean..."
"Don't."
Softly, so softly, he asks, "What happened?"
Dean turns back to him and gets into his face again, hands fisting Sam's jacket.
"You don't get to talk about this. Not this."
"But it was dad."
Dean's face looks so young. He's only twenty-seven, but he's always looked older to Sam, maybe because he's his big brother, maybe because he's shouldered more burden than anyone ever should. Maybe because he was carrying this terrible secret for God only knows how long.
He looked younger in the photos.
"Why did you want him to burn you?"
Dean jerks back a little in surprise at the change in subject. Not quite a change, more a tangential enquiry.
He punches Sam in the face and leaves.
Dean comes back sometime before dawn.
He sits on the edge of Sam's bed.
"I wanted something to remember him," he slurs. "Something I couldn't lose."
He starts to cry in a way Sam doesn't think he's ever heard him cry before - wretched sobs that tear out of him and shake his body. He sits up and pulls Dean into his arms and Dean just lets him, just falls against him and sobs, soaking Sam's shirt in seconds.
"I lost more than you could ever know," he says.
Sam thinks that if dad wasn't already dead, he'd put a bullet in him. Maybe a whole clip.
"I loved him," Dean whispers. "He loved me."
"When did it start?" he asks, because he must know, even if it destroys him, wondering would only drive him mad.
"After you left."
Sam can't help the broken noise he makes. Dean pulls back and holds Sam's face between his hands, eyes drunkenly honest as he insists, "It wasn't your fault. That's not why. It's just when."
Dean clumsily wipes underneath Sam's eyes. He's crying, too.
"But why?"
Dean looks away and lets go of Sam. "I love him."
"But he was our dad."
"I know. I still love him. I can't help it."
"When he came back, did you..."
"Yes."
Sam stumbles to the bathroom and throws up in the toilet. He feels Dean's hand on his back, stroking like he used to when Sam got the flu or a stomach bug.
After Sam's brushed his teeth, they wordlessly go to bed. The same bed. Dean curls around Sam the best he can now that Sam's so much bigger than him, like they used to when they were kids, when dad had been gone too long and Sam was having nightmares about him dying.
Sam dreams he is a child sitting in bed while dad holds Dean down in the other bed and puts cigarettes out on his skin. Dean turns to him with a blissful smile and says it's okay Sammy, I love him.