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No one asks Sam what he wants.
Then again, Sam suspects from the look on his brother’s face as they’re both hauled out of the car and marched into the middle of the woods that Dean’s opinion wasn’t needed on this one either. It’s dark out—overcast and pitch black aside from the bobbing of Dad and Bobby’s flashlights, and the sound of everyone’s breath and the snapping of twigs seems overly loud. The ground is slick and cold from the rain that fell that afternoon, and Sam keeps losing his balance and almost falling because his mind is on the spelling test he has tomorrow instead of on where he’s putting his feet.
Dean catches him every time, just like always, and it makes Sam scowl and try to drift further away. He’s a big kid now, all of nine, and he doesn’t need Dean holding his hand when he crosses the street, or telling him when to brush his teeth, or making him drink his milk. He sure doesn’t need Dean clinging to him the way his brother seems to want to do.
He’d almost think Dean’s afraid, except Dean doesn’t say anything. And Sam’s big brother is never afraid.
Dad and Bobby are talking as they walk—Bobby arguing that this is stupid, that John doesn’t know what it’s going to do, and Dad arguing back that it’s the only way. Bobby heard that psychic as well as him, after all, and whatever side effects it has will be worth it if they can turn aside fate.
Sam doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but he thinks it might have something to do with their last hunt, when Dad ran into a possessed girl who puked blood for days, it seems, and he eventually had to call Bobby in for help. Bobby never left, even after the demon was gone, and he’s seemed unhappy. Keeps shooting fretful, concerned looks in Dean and Sam’s direction.
And now they’re here, and Sam’s breath is ghosting out, and they finally come to a stop and Dad’s gruff voice tells them to keep out of the way while they set up. Dean obediently sits down on a convenient log to wait, but Sam drifts around the clearing a bit, watching Dad and Bobby build a fire and mix some things into a paste.
And he watches Dean, who does maybe look a little scared and small in the firelight, with his slight frame shaking and his shoulders hunched in his hand-me-down jacket. Dean doesn’t just look scared, he looks unhappy. It kind of makes Sam want to go over and sit down next to him, but he doesn’t want to stop moving.
Dean must be freezing over there on that log, so far from the fire.
Finally, Dad and Bobby are ready, and then Sam has to come over and strip off his shirt, and Dean does the same. Luckily, they’re both standing by the fire now, and it’s hot enough that there’s sweat dripping off their skin as Bobby and Dad paint their torsos with arcane symbols.
Sam isn’t sure what happens next, because the paste is making his skin itch and it’s distracting, and the next clear thought he has is to wonder what Dad’s doing with a knife to Dean’s chest.
“Give me your hand, Sammy,” Dad rumbles, and Sam sees his hand lift as though in a fog. Dad wraps Sam’s fingers around the knife handle beneath his own, rougher grip, and then they’re both drawing the knife down and there’s blood spilling out on Dean’s skin. He winces, tears swimming in his eyes, but doesn’t pull away. Sam’s too buzzed to feel guilty.
Dad puts the knife away and then presses Sam’s hand over the cut, and Sam can feel his brother’s heart pounding at an impossible, lightning-quick pace. Dean’s blood is on his palm, slick and hot, and Sam realizes that he’s been staring into his brother’s eyes for a while now.
He doesn’t think they’ve ever been so green before.
“Repeat after me, Sammy,” Dad murmurs through the haze. “Blood of my blood, bone of my bone, far deeper than oceans, far stronger than stone. As two we once were, now as one shall we be, my guardian soldier, to watch over me.”
Sam isn’t sure whether he repeats the words or not, but he must because there’s a blinding crack of light and then everything goes away except for Dean’s wide, startled eyes.
“Forget, Sammy,” Dad’s voice says sometime later, and gentle hands brush his forehead. “Forget.”
Sammy does.
Dean’s sixteen when Sam first notices him the wrong way: sixteen and already a man, no matter what the law says. Dean is sixteen and half-naked—less because it’s hot out and more because Tiffany Rawlins is sunbathing on the lawn across the street. Dean’s been out as long as she has, working on the Impala and posing up a storm, and now he’s sweat-slick and covered with grease. Dean isn’t looking Tiffany’s way, but Sam can tell that his brother is acutely aware of her eyes on him. That he likes it.
And then Dean straightens from his bent over position in front of the hood, wiping one arm across his brow, and his eyes meet Sam’s.
Something tightens, low and hot, in Sam’s stomach. His mouth goes dry, his palms clammy. He’s blushing, feels caught out, and yet can’t seem to look away.
Dean isn’t dropping his eyes either, and the self-satisfied smirk has slipped off his lips. He looks like he just got sucker punched—uncomfortable and upset and winded—and from the corner of his eyes, Sam can see his brother’s hands flex on the edge of the engine.
Then Tiffany is there, leaning into view and making some laughing comment about how handy Dean is, and could he take a look at her transmission?
Dean’s eyes shutter, and close down, and then wind up again like a mechanical toy’s. When he turns to face the girl—the intruder, Sam can’t help thinking of her as—he’s smiling again. All charm and slick manners.
Sam lies awake in bed that night when Dean slips out, and when his brother comes home smelling of sex, he does his best not to cry.
There’s never a moment Sam lets himself be deceived that it’s right. He knows from the first that it’s wrong—that he’s wrong to want what he does. And he doesn’t let himself pretend that he isn’t alone in wanting, either.
At least until Rosewood, Indiana, when he’s sixteen and starting to catch up to Dean in height and breadth. At least until he wanders into the kitchen for a midnight glass of milk and finds Dean already there, sitting on the counter and sipping out of a beer bottle.
“Dad’ll kill you if he catches you drinking that,” Sam says, pretending he isn’t noticing the way the moonlight plays off his brother’s bare chest.
Dean shrugs and tips the bottle back further. “Dad’s not gonna be home for another week,” he points out.
It isn’t like he says anything wrong, or even says the words in an odd way. It’s all in his eyes, and the way he’s still looking at Sam even when he’s taking a pull from the bottle. It’s in his expression, and the tilt of his body—like he’s showing off. Like Sam’s a girl he wants to impress.
And Sam gets it.
He moves toward Dean without thinking, and Dean is off the counter and moving away so fast that Sam doubts, for an instant, that he saw what he did. But Dean’s movements are jerky and embarrassed, and there’s a smell in the air—some salty musk.
Arousal.
“Dean,” he tries, but Dean dumps his bottle into the trash and keeps on heading out of the kitchen without stopping, making a wide detour around Sam as he goes.
“Get some sleep, Sammy. School tomorrow.”
After that, Sam doesn’t see much of his brother. Dean keeps making excuses not to be around, keeps finding a new girl to pass the time with, and eventually Sam decides to stop waiting for his brother to change his mind. Eventually there are a few dates of his own, and then there are SATs, and then there’s Stanford.
Dean doesn’t say anything when he leaves. He won’t even look at Sam.
But somehow, Sam still thinks he can feel his brother’s heart breaking.
He dreams, sometimes, at Stanford.
Sometimes a forest at night, and Dean looking small and hunched in on himself on a cold, damp log.
Sometimes Dean, half-naked in the kitchen. Dean looking at him with heated eyes that promise things Sam isn’t brave enough to name.
Sometimes, it’s a bed. Dean’s body feels too hot against Sam’s, like he’s formed of fire, and there are words pounding in Sam’s head as he nips along his brother’s throat.
Blood of my blood, bone of my bone ...
He wakes hard, with a lump in his throat and an ache deep in his chest. Even when Jess is there to help soothe the ache away, he always takes care of his cock on his own, later. Takes care of it in the bathroom with his eyes closed and his brother’s teasing grin in his mind.
Dean calls him once, after one of the sex dreams. Dean calls when Sam is just about to wrap his hand around his cock and take care of it, and Sam’s tempted to ignore the phone but Dean hardly ever calls anymore, so he doesn’t.
“Hey,” he says instead, and if he sounds a little breathless, then it’s nothing to the rasp of Dean’s voice on the other end.
“Sammy.”
Sam sits up straighter in his bed (he’s alone tonight, Jess back east visiting her folks) and frowns into the darkened room. “Something wrong? Are you okay? Is it Dad?”
“Sammy, you,” Dean says, and then halts to take a ragged breath. “You gotta stop.”
“Stop?” Sam repeats, confused. “Stop what? Are you—Dean, are you drunk?”
There’s near silence on the other end of the phone, broken only by his brother’s unsteady breathing. Sam realizes that he’s lightly stroking his cock to the sound and reluctantly moves his hand away.
“How about you sleep it off and call me back in the morning, okay, man? Whatever it is will look better then.”
Dean makes a noise halfway between a laugh and a sob and then mumbles, “Fuck you, asshole. You fucking—you left me, you can’t keep fucking dragging me back. You have to stop.”
Sam’s brow furrows as he swings his legs out of the bed. “Dragging you—What the hell are you talking about?”
“Don’t call me anymore,” Dean says, voice harsh. “Don’t fucking—fuck, don’t. Don’t even think about me.”
A second later he’s gone and Sam is left listening to an empty dial tone.
Dean comes back to him.
It takes a couple years, but Dean comes back for him. Can’t do it without him, he says, and Sam’s feeling petty enough to call him on it—changes the ‘can’t’ to a ‘don’t want to’. Even if there are other, hotter things between them Dean still refuses to acknowledge.
Or maybe that time’s done for Dean. Maybe it wasn’t anything but some false dream on the road, something sepia-toned and washed out from the sunlight of endless summers spent pounding pavement. Either way it makes for an awkward weekend, and Sam’s almost glad to see the Impala disappear down the street.
Then there’s blood on his forehead, and Jess on the ceiling, and Dean is inexplicably back, dragging Sam from danger the way he always does. Sam’s own perfect, beautiful guardian soldier.
Sam asks, later, how Dean knew to come back, and Dean just shrugs without looking at him.
“Guess saving your ass is too strong a habit to kick,” he says. “Come on, we’ve got miles to go if we’re gonna make it to Pasadena before dark.”
Saving Sam’s ass certainly becomes a habit after that, anyway. Or maybe it was all along: Sam can’t be sure. He notices it more now, anyway—sees how often it’s Dean they’re stitching up instead of him. It seems like Dean is always there when he turns around these days, watching him. It seems like Dean is always at his elbow to help him out of the car, or passing him a napkin at dinner before he can even ask, or just watching him from across the room with this steady, unreadable expression.
But it isn’t until Dean’s supposed to be two towns away looking through death records and instead turns up just in time to keep Sam’s head attached to his shoulders that Sam thinks to question it. Dean tries to shrug it away again, after, but now Sam’s thinking, and there have been way too many coincidences for it to sit easy with him.
Turns out, this particular secret must have been burning its way out of his brother’s throat for years because it doesn’t take more than a couple days of prodding to get Dean to crack. And crack he does—all the words spilling out of his mouth like water from a broken dam, all the sullen, resentful anger snapping bright in his eyes.
After, he storms out of the motel room, leaving Sam still sitting stunned on the bed. Sam doesn’t wonder if he’ll come back.
If Dean was telling the truth, he can’t do anything else. He won’t be able to help himself.
When Sam can get his body to move again, he picks up the phone and calls Bobby.
“I’m sorry.”
Dean doesn’t look over at the sound of Sam’s voice as he comes into the room. Although Sam can smell the alcohol on him, he isn’t staggering at all. Seems just as steady on his feet as ever.
“I didn’t ask for it,” Sam adds, watching as his brother shrugs off his leather jacket and drops it in the middle of the floor.
It’s meant as an apology—the only olive branch he has to offer, since Bobby told him the bonding is irreversible—and Sam means it. Sam means it and he needs, desperately, for Dean to tell him it’s okay, not Sam’s fault, doesn’t blame him for having some kind of dark destiny that Dad felt he had to head off at the pass by sacrificing Dean’s chance for any kind of life of his own.
But Dean only laughs bitterly and replies, “I didn’t either.”
It takes them a couple of weeks to get comfortable with each other again, but once Sam stops spending every waking moment feeling guilty about what Dad did to Dean, understanding sinks in quickly. They’re walking down a street when it finally hits him, and he stops dead, mouth dropping open. Dean moves a few steps ahead of him and then stops, glancing back with a wary, resigned expression.
“Sammy,” he sighs.
“You know,” Sam says. “At Stanford, every time I—every thing I thought about you.”
Dean cuts his eyes away and shoves his hands in his pockets. “That’s not how it works,” he mutters. “I can’t read your mind.”
“Not thoughts, but—Bobby said feelings? You can—you feel what I feel?”
Dean bites out a low swear and turns around, starting forward again. He gets about ten steps from Sam before swearing a second time and stalking back.
“Yes, okay?” he hisses, keeping his eyes fixed on the street. “I know. I always knew. Now can you just accept it and move the fuck on already? Goddamned pooka isn’t gonna kill itself.”
Sam manages to wait until the hunt’s over and they’re back in the motel room to ask.
“That night in the kitchen,” he says then, and doesn’t have to say any more.
Dean lets out a slow sigh, turning to face Sam and meeting his gaze for the first time all day. Sam can’t read his expression, Dean hidden behind walls he’s spent his entire life building, but there’s no mistaking the intent with which Dean pulls his shirt over his head and opens his pants.
It feels like all the air has left the room.
“Dean,” Sam manages, struggling to catch his breath.
“You want it?” Dean says as he pushes his pants down and off. “Fine. Just fucking take it.”
But Sam shakes his head. “I’m not—Dean, I’m not doing that to you.”
Dean’s there almost before Sam has finished speaking, grabbing Sam’s hand and pressing it against his cock. He’s hard. Oh fuck is he hard.
“Is that—is that you or me?” Sam whispers, although he can feel his restraint slipping. He isn’t a saint, after all.
Dean shakes his head once, eyes intent and demanding on Sam’s. The confession falls from his lips, damning, even as Sam bends his head to take his brother’s mouth with his own.
“I don’t know.”