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jinkieswouldyoulookatthis · 4 months

Text

Something Stupid

Just a one shot coda to Red Meat (11x17) that I'm not sure how to tag. It's not explicitly wincest but it's also not not wincest, you know? Weirdly close, boundaries what boundaries sort of thing.

Sam/Dean, but also maybe more Sam&Dean, idek, they do kiss but it's not that kind of kiss, except maybe it kinda is??? Honestly, your guess is as good as mine.

words: 2765

read it on AO3

~~~

It was a nineteen hour drive back to the Bunker, they did it in seventeen. Dean insisted on driving the whole way, with only the fewest necessary pit stops to piss and refuel. And even with long hours of sleep to the soothing rumble of the Impala, better than any skeezy Magic Fingers bed as far as Sam was concerned, he gave a groaning sigh of relief when he unfolded himself from the passenger seat and stood, carefully stretching, in the Men of Letters garage.

“How’s the side?” Dean asked, eyes on Sam’s stomach, where he’d had to dig a bullet out of him less than two days ago, as he opened the trunk and grabbed out their duffles.

“Sore, but, uh, the meds are still doing their thing, so, not too bad.”

Dean quietly grunted and gave a nod.

Sam knew, before he offered, that Dean wouldn’t let him carry his own bag, so he wasn’t surprised by the gruff, “I got it,” as his brother shut the trunk and started around towards him and the stairs down into the rest of the Bunker.

He still didn’t know what Dean had done while they’d been separated back in Grangeville, but he knew him and couldn’t help but see the extra weight he was carrying that was affecting him way more than a couple of duffle bags. He turned and fell into step beside him.

“You okay?” he asked.

A rapid flash of emotion played over Dean’s face before it settled into a weary smile.

Huh, his faking it smile used to be so much brighter, and the thought rolled over Sam in a wave of loss.

“We’re home, I’m good.” Dean said through the smile that was still miles away from his eyes. The emphasis on the first word wasn’t lost on Sam.

They both took the stairs a little slow, stiff and sore. Dean’s left knee audibly crunching as he bent it, something that had started up a couple of years ago. He insisted it didn’t hurt, that it sounded worse than it felt, but on days like today Sam silently doubted him.

Dean set both bags down on the map table and rested his hands on them for a moment. Normally, when they returned from a hunt, they’d both sort their stuff, throw a load of the grossest clothes into the washing machine, and put their gear away before crashing. Sometimes though, the crashing came first and Sam definitely felt like this was one of those times. He started to move off towards the hallway that led to his room.

“You hungry?” Dean asked suddenly, pulling Sam up short. “We’ve barely eaten in days. Come on, I’ll make you a sandwich.”

Sam wasn’t hungry, not even remotely, and he was fairly certain that Dean wasn’t either.

“Yeah. Yeah, that’d be good,” he said anyway.

Dean tilted his head towards the doorway that led to the kitchen and started to walk the long way around the map table ensuring that Sam would be ahead of him, where he could see him. Something clicked, even when his eyes had been on the road, driving back to the bunker, Dean hadn’t really looked away from Sam, always keeping him in his periphery, his gaze flicking over to verify that his brother was actually there and still breathing. And he was still doing it, still keeping Sam where he could see him, like he was afraid that if he took his eyes off of him for more than a moment, Sam would somehow vanish.

They’d both had so many (too many) close calls, brushes with death, some of which were painted in fast, broad, vague strokes, an impression of the end. While some were full, layered, oil paintings with photo-realistic detailing, way too real to just shrug off. Sam got it, he understood the struggle to settle and accept that they’d managed to slip past Death one more time, that they were both still here, still together.

So he wandered into the kitchen, Dean right on his heels. And as Dean busied himself throwing together a couple of sandwiches, Sam pulled two beers from the fridge, because even though he had no idea what time it actually was, they’d been up for so long, so fucking long, and the beer would help wash down the sandwiches. Sam ate his without tasting anything, mechanically, methodically consuming it simply to make Dean happy. They ate in companionable silence.

Still, the worry about what Dean may have done (definitely did) was beginning to loom up around them again, awkward and ominous. He found he didn’t have the energy to deal with it right then. He cleared his throat.

“Iron Maiden’s playing in Chicago next week, think we could still get tickets?”

Dean nodded, thinking about that, “Yeah, worth a try, and, uh, Scorpions is gonna be in St. Louis in May. 50th anniversary tour. That’d be cool to see.”

It was Sam’s turn to nod. “Wow, fifty years. That’s, that’s a long run.”

Dean lifted his beer, “To old guys who still rock.”

Sam huffed out a laugh and clicked his bottle against Dean’s, but as he drained the rest of his beer, his thoughts were on how impossibly exhausting forty more years of their own brand of rocking felt.

When they were done and had cleaned up, Dean looked at him. “How’re you doing?”

“Tired.”

“Yeah, me too. Come on, off to bed with you.”

Sam wandered towards his room, Dean right beside him still. When they got to the point where they’d have to separate to go to their rooms, Dean asked, “You good to get that bandage changed before you crash?”

“I, uh, I forgot to grab the kit, would you mind...”

“Yep. Get changed, I’ll be right back.”

In his room, Sam stripped out of his jeans and underwear, replacing them with a clean pair of shorts and sweatpants. Dean strolled in as Sam was pulling his tee shirt over his head, packs of gauze pads, medical tape, and a tube of antibiotic ointment in hand.

“Whoa, look at you. You’re basically one big bruise.”

Sam grimaces as he lowers his left arm back down. “Yep. That’ll happen when you get thrown through a table by a werewolf and then shot.”

Dean began carefully peeling off the old gauze. “Yeah, but then you took down three of them after being mostly dead all night.”

Sam sucked a sharp breath through his teeth as the part of the bandage that was stuck to the scabbed over wound pulled free. “After I killed that first one.”

Dean dabs at Sam’s stitched up bullet wound with the ointment and then peels open a fresh, sterile gauze pad

“So that’s four for me and…”

Dean places the gauze against Sam’s side, grabs his left hand and places it over the gauze, holding it in place while he rips a piece of tape.

“... and, uh, one for you.”

Instead of getting annoyed at Sam’s competitive tone, Dean just grins proudly up at him. “Yeah, you did good, Sammy.”

He finished taping the gauze and then tidied up as Sam tugged a clean shirt over his head.

“Think fast.”

Despite feeling like he’d been thrown through a table, shot, and then came dangerously close to bleeding out, Sam managed to catch the pill bottle that Dean had tossed at him. He sat down on the side of his bed and twisted off the cap. Dean got him a glass of water from the sink and he washed down a pill and handed the glass back to Dean, who sat it back by the sink and then turned and leaned back against the porcelain.

Sam pulled the covers down and carefully laid down on his right side, which put his back towards Dean. The fact that Dean hadn’t excused himself from the room, Sam could tell he was still leaning against the sink, confirmed Sam’s suspicions from earlier that his brother wasn’t ready to be alone.

“Quite lurking by the door.” He patted the mattress.

Dean didn’t move.

“Dean?”

“Hmm.”

“Just sit down and talk to me for a bit.”

“What do you want me to talk about?” he asked, but he walked around the bed and sat down against the headboard. He still had his boots on, so he kept his right foot on the floor and bent his left leg so that his foot hung off the side of the bed, he crossed his arms across his chest.

“Anything. Uh, you still want to go see Batman vs. Superman?”

“Pfft! Yeah.”

“Even with Affleck as Batman?”

Sam didn’t care about the movie, but he knew that Dean had thoughts about it so that was all it took to get his brother talking. Sam just mmhmm’ed and uh-huh’ed along until Dean lapsed back into silence. Sam would have been asleep by then, but there was that worrying little thought he still couldn’t quite shake.

“What did you do? Seriously, I know you. You know I know you. And I know that had to be… I know what it feels like, Dean.” He waited, this was the moment, Dean was either going to leave or he’d start talking.

Finally, his brother nodded his head, just a little, and started picking at a hangnail.

“Nothing good. It’s never anything good. It’s like I… I can’t… like all the good choices are just gone and only the stupid ones are left.”

When it became clear that Dean wasn’t going to say anything more, Sam gently asked, “You gonna tell me about it?”

“No. No, I don’t think I am. I just, you’re all I’ve… ”

Sam waited again to see if he’d finish. After a few long moments he sighed and softly said, “I know. You too, you know? For me. Things are, uh, they’re harder when you’re… when you’re gone. They, uh, they get…”

“Bleak.”

“Yeah,” Sam sighed and pushed his hand a little closer to Dean, stopping an inch or two from his leg, just letting his hand rest on top of the covers.

“So what do we do?”

Dean cut his eyes to the side and looked at Sam. “About what?”

“Well, we, uh, we either need to stop dying, which…”

Dean scoffed, “What’re the odds of that happening?”

“Right? Or… or we need to figure out how to make better choices when… when things get bleak.”

“Sam, I… I can’t.” There was a finality to his voice that broke something in Sam, another crack in his foundation that caused him to cant a little bit more towards his brother. Some days it felt like all he was was sloppily patched and cobbled together frame-work that should, by all rights, have collapsed by now.

“Dear boy, you're all duct tape and safety pins inside. How are you alive?”

He had lost count of all the times Vesta’s words had echoed through his thoughts over the years. But the fact of the matter was that he was still alive because Dean was alive, because his brother wouldn’t, couldn’t let him be dead.

The silence stretched on. He knew that the way things were going, the way their lives went, one or both of them was bound to get killed again, and there was never a guarantee of another resurrection, or of getting yet another do-over. At some point their story would end and the thought that he was going to lose his brother made it hard to breathe.

Dean shifted and for a moment Sam thought he was going to get up and go. But instead, Dean relaxed his arms so that his left hand came to rest beside his leg, his pinky brushing feather-light against the tips of Sam’s fingers.

“I should let you get some rest.”

Before he’d even finished talking, Sam had curled his fingers around Dean’s.

“Stay.” His heart lurched and he softly added. “I don’t want to be alone.” And he meant there in the room and right then and there, he did, but he was also speaking to his fears for the future. But he wasn’t ready to talk about that, didn’t know if he ever would be.

A tremor ran through his brother’s hand before he gave Sam’s fingers a squeeze. And Sam didn’t think he’d imagined the catch in Dean’s voice as he said, “Yeah, okay. Until you fall asleep.” So maybe Dean had heard the deeper meaning anyway.

Exhaustion took him almost immediately and for the first time in a long, long time he slept soundly, unbothered by dreams or nightmares.

When he woke up, he was still on his side, he hadn’t moved at all, which confirmed how soundly he’d slept. Usually, he tossed and turned, waking up enough to note the passing time every two hours or so.

He moved his hand to wipe the drool from the side of his mouth and found that his fingers were still entwined with Dean’s. He blinked his eyes open and was met with his brother’s eyes, already open and looking at him from where he was curled up under the covers on the other side of the bed.

“Please tell me you haven’t just been laying there watching me sleep.” He joked as his eyes shut and he yawned.

“I can’t lose you.” Dean’s voice was quiet and low, rough with too much emotion and Sam was surprised to see tears welling up when he opened his eyes again.

Before he could react though, Dean reached up and wiped the corner of Sam’s mouth, catching the remnants of drool with his thumb and giving a small fond smile that broke through the sadness like the sun shining through gaps in a cloud filled sky. His eyes flicked down to watch as he rubbed his fingertips together. When they were dry he looked back at Sam, his eyes tracing along the features of his face, and he brushed Sam’s hair back, his fingers curling around the back of his head. Dean pulled Sam forward as he leaned in and placed a kiss on his forehead. It was a slow press that lingered for a long moment. Sam’s heart caught in his throat. When Dean pulled back, it was only far enough to tip his own head down until their foreheads and noses were touching and they were breathing each other’s air.

Dean’s thumb rubbed gently, back and forth, against Sam’s cheek. His eyes were moving, too close to focus but like he was trying to take in every detail anyway. He smoothed Sam’s hair back from his face again and then started to pull him even closer.

“What? What’re you…” Sam started.

“Something stupid.” Dean whispered as he let his eyes fall shut and pressed their lips together.

Sam’s heart was pounding, his mind reeling.

He knew that Dean must have kissed him at some point when they were kids. Kisses goodnight, that was a thing that little kids did, right? So surely it must have happened. But he couldn’t remember a single occurrence, not once in his memory. And now, in the span of just a moment, his brother had kissed him twice. He was kissing him. Right then, Dean was kissing him. It was a simple, closed mouth kiss, that may have been chaste and innocent if, you know, they were the type of family that kissed, at all. But even then, Dean was shaking. He was shaking and he hitched a breath in as he parted his lips just as he started to pull away.

“I’m sorry.” Dean said as the shaking increased, a clear note of panic creeping into his voice.

All at once, the shock that had frozen Sam in place was gone and he grabbed Dean’s head with both hands, holding him in place.

“Don’t be sorry. Please don’t be sorry.” He said as he pulled him back into another kiss. It wasn’t open mouthed or anything but there was an undeniable desperation to it, a fevered pitch of longing and need that Sam wasn’t even trying to wrap his head around. And when he broke away he didn’t pull away. Instead he burrowed down and tucked himself under Dean’s chin and held him even tighter. “It’s okay. We’re okay. We’re both still here, okay?”

Dean choked out a laugh. “We are so fucked up.” But he wrapped his arms around his brother and pulled him closer.

There was bound to be at least a moment of awkwardness when they untangled, Sam decided he wasn’t going to worry about that, not yet.

#wincest #gencest #wincest fanfic #gencest fanfic #spn 11x17 #spn episode coda fic #samdean

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