Archive of Our Own

Time passes in stops and starts, in streetlights and stop signs, in victims and survivors.

They go east.

Past Albuquerque and Dallas, the land reshapes itself. The trees grow thicker, their leaves hanging as if weighed down, and the air smells of rain and dying greenery and strong, pungent soil. Voices slow and vowels lengthen.

They take turns driving, and Dean doesn't tell Sam why he wants to go east, and Sam doesn't ask, but he ends each day knowing just how many miles are between them and California and just how long it would take to get back there.

* * *

They snake through Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama.

Case follows case, and Sam learns--remembers--how to fight next to Dean, how to move so they complement one another, how to fall into place beside his brother, and how it can be as natural as breathing. It's involuntary and instinctive, and it becomes harder to remember what it felt like before.

Sam had forgotten how well they worked together. But he learns how easy it can be when he stops resisting, when he accepts and let's go.

Law school isn't waiting for him, time hasn't stopped, and his college days have become a blur, an impressionist painting, dreamlike and hazy, and unconnected to who he is now.

* * *

Two months after talking to their father, Sam wakes up to Dean smacking his forehead.

“Get up, asshole.” Dean has a cup of coffee waiting on Sam's nightstand, still hot enough to burn Sam's tongue when Sam takes the first drink. “We have a job in Florida.”

Dean sits down on the pea green chair in the corner of the room and starts tracing out their trip in his black pen that bleeds, the lines fuzzing and thickening.

And it's then, watching Dean, that Sam realizes he hasn't dreamed of Jessica in a week.

* * *

Death comes close, too close, but they live; they survive.

They're on a dirt road ten miles outside Ocala, Florida, driving past green grass and shrubs and white, knotted trees half buried in swamp water when Dean says, “Dad never liked it here.”

Def Leppard is playing on the radio, yelling about red lights and shotguns, and with the windows open it's almost loud enough to drown Dean out.

“Florida?” Sam asks, because he can't remember them ever coming here.

“No, the East, dipshit. You were too young to remember, but we went to...”

Dean talks for a half an hour about a job next to a Marine base, about how their dad liked the West, and how he got his first scar--a long white line going from his knee to his upper thigh.

* * *

In Kentucky they set up camp while waiting for an Ettin. It's cold and with one sleeping bag lost in Tennessee, it only takes an hour before Dean pushes his way in with Sam. “Move over.”

Dean's fingers against his skin are enough to make him shake--icy even through the material of his shirt. “You could have just got in here the first time I asked.”

“Shut up.”

Dean wraps around him like a blanket, cold skin made warm, and Sam can't stop himself from relaxing into it, shoulder blades becoming liquid against Dean's chest. Blinking becomes longer, snail-like, and it takes concentrated effort to force his eyelids back up.

“Stay awake, Sam,” Dean says, breath surprisingly hot against Sam's neck. “We need to keep watch.”

An hour passes before they hear loud sticks breaking under foot—no real way for something twelve feet tall to move quietly--and they're awake and up by the time it reaches them. Shoulders brush together and move apart as they attack, the feel of Dean next to Sam is as natural as his own shadow.

“Good job, Sammy,” Dean tells him as they're walking back to the car, clothes thick with dirt from the burial.

* * *

Sam knows that Dean calls their dad every few days. He never does it in front of Sam, and since he never tells Sam, Sam knows that Dean hasn't gotten an answer.

Part of Sam has been bracing himself for weeks, for months for the nightmare. The one where he sees his father in flames, suspended from the ceiling, bleeding gut wound dark and spreading, but it never comes, and it's during the fifteenth week of silence that they get the text. Short and to the point, it directs them to a town in Ohio.

Something in Dean seems to loosen after that, and that night when they stop, Dean buys them drinks until they're stumbling to their hotel, passing out in the same bed with the smell of whiskey and Bud on their breath.

“Don't worry, Sam. Dad won't stop until that sonnabitch is dead,” Dean slurs before falling to sleep, his quiet snores filling the room, his knee in Sam's thigh, and his head heavy against Sam's shoulder and neck.

* * *

They continue to sleep in the same bed after that. It's like when they were kids, and Sam sleeps better, sleeps quieter, and when he does wake up he spends the first few minutes just breathing. He missed this.

Dean no longer goes out at nights and comes home smelling like women's perfume and sex, and they don't talk about it, any of it, but the first time Sam wakes up with jerking hips, boxers the only thing between Dean's ass and his dick, he jumps away and Dean just rolls onto his back, hand rising to scrub the sleep away from his eyes.

“Get into the shower. Check out time's in an hour.”

“Fuck you,” Sam answers, his legs already swinging over the edge of the mattress, the mustard yellow bedspread covering his lap.

“And don't take all the hot water.”

* * *

It's inevitable after that.

Touches linger, skin on familiar skin, and if Sam still misses his old life, still loves Jessica, still wonders what kind of house he and Jessica would have bought, what their kids would have looked like, what kind of lawyer he would have made, it seems a little more distant and a little less important now.

* * *

The first time they have sex Sam is tired and hot and aching.

Dean's hands are calloused and rough in his hair, voice gravelly in his ear. “Fuck, Sam,” and “listen to me next time,” and “stubborn bitch” are bitten out against his neck. Dean's teeth are sharp and hard on his shoulders, his lips, the spot between his jaw and ear.

Dean smells like fear and sweat, his freckles more noticeable against his skin, and his forehead wrinkled in concentration.

It takes Dean a minute to push up Sam's shirt and open his jeans, and then, oh god, and then Dean's hands are on his cock. Ruthless and hot and pulling until Sam can do little but push and swear and jerk Dean closer.

He comes with Dean's tongue sliding against his own, Dean's scent on his skin, and Dean's strong, sure hands wrapped around him.

* * *

Seeing Dean after that is different. It's like something's been opened, pulled back. He knows what Dean sounds like when Sam takes him into his mouth, what Dean looks like when Sam's inside him. He knows the hidden, secret parts.

Once, when Sam was young and angry because he had to go track down a poltergeist instead of going to a friend's birthday party, Dean pulled him aside and said that he needed to remember why they did this, he needed to remember the people they saved.

Sam knew then that police officers, fire fighters, and doctors all saved people. They saved people and lived in a house and had friends and didn't move. They had lives and were normal, and Sam wanted that so bad that he couldn't think about much else.

Now Sam has no doubt that their dad will track down Jessica's murderer and kill it, but that life is gone and dead, and Sam's not sure if he has a reason, if he has a purpose the way Dean does, but he doesn't miss it much anymore.

So, when Dean turns and asks, “Where to?” Sam looks at the paper, sees the cases he's marked in California, in Michigan, in Massachusetts, and turns to Dean. “I've never been to Boston.”

 

end.