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Dean dies with Sam’s breath in his lungs and Sam’s lips against his.
It’s barely a kiss, just a brush of skin against skin. Sam is weeping, sobbing “not now, not now” into his mouth, and Dean isn’t sure if he means the accident or the kiss, but it doesn’t matter – he knows it’s not fair to Sam, not fair to die first and leave him behind, not fair to kiss him now, at the last possible minute, when nothing can ever come of it except more heartache and more pain.
But Dean is dying and he is scared and Sam’s sweet, sweet face is right there in front of him, and Dean needs to be as close as he can get.
He wonders if Sam can taste death on his tongue.
Sam’s lips are chapped and they taste like copper and salt, but Dean still believes that underneath the tears, he can taste cheap movie theater popcorn and pearl-toothed laughter, dust and sweat and gas station fumes, beer and pancake syrup, fire and blood, sadness and fear and love, so, so much love, and really –
All things considered, that’s not a bad way to go.
Dean wakes up, and he is in hell. It must be hell because he remembers dying. He is blind and he can’t move and hellfire is burning in his lungs, and why did he ever think that maybe, just maybe he wasn’t going to wake up in this forsaken place again?
Then he hears Sam’s voice, faintly, reaching him from somewhere, through the fog.
“Calm down, Dean,” Sam says. “It’s alright, Dean,” he says. “I’m here.”
Dean cries, then. Because Sam isn’t supposed to be here. Sam wasn’t supposed to follow him. Sam was supposed to live.
The next time he wakes, he is still in pain, but when he opens his eyes, he sees fluorescent lights and pale-blue curtains and a television screen mounted to the ceiling on the opposite wall, playing an old episode of Grey’s Anatomy.
Hell, it turns out, is a hospital.
The first time Sam lets himself be convinced, reluctantly, that Dean is well enough to run into town on his own for groceries, Dean feels a little like Rip Van Winkle, wandering into the village after having slept through the past twenty years.
Contrary to his previous assumption, apparently even in Lebanon, Kansas time does not stand entirely still. In the months he spent in a coma, then in protracted, excruciating recovery, the sun-faded posters in the display cases outside the small movie theater have finally been replaced. There are signs announcing the opening of a new diner just off Route 281, and the checkout at the small mom-and-pop store is fielded by a young woman Dean has never seen before.
“Mr. Campbell,” old Janet calls out from around the cereal shelf when he walks in, holding himself carefully, leaning heavily on his cane.
“Good to see you out and about.”
“You can say that again,” Dean sighs, feeling irrationally relieved to recognize a familiar face after all. With some effort, he bends down to grab a basket from the stack. “If it was up to me, I would have come by earlier, but Sam has been motherhenning like he’s getting paid for it.”
“Of course, of course,” Janet clucks, and hurries over to take the basket from his left hand with an indulgent smile that stops any protest he might consider putting up when she slides the handle over her own forearm.
“You had that poor boy worried, you know.”
Dean smiles tightly and nods and doesn’t respond because oh yes, he knows, he knows, but this is not something he can talk to Janet at the grocery store about. So instead he caves and changes the topic by asking her to help him gather the things on his list, because as much as it pains him to admit it, Sam may have been right about it being too soon: all he has done is walk the five steps from the curb to the door, and already his entire body hurts.
Apparently getting crushed under the bed of a pickup truck will do that to a man.
The new girl at the checkout eyes him curiously while she scans the milk and the bread and the pepperoni, and Dean wonders, a little absent-mindedly, what kind of stories she may have heard about them, what sort of thing Sam might have said when he came here on his own, week after week, while Dean was laid up in his bed at the bunker, alone with his pain and his thoughts.
Just in case, Dean gives her a smile – a reassuring one, he hopes – and she returns the smile together with his credit card and the receipt, apparently unfazed by the grim scar cutting across his left cheek.
“Here you go,” she says, friendly enough, and then, as he is already turning away from her, the plastic bag handle heavy against the crook of his fingers: “Give my best to your husband as well.”
Dean almost trips over his cane in surprise. He pauses, blinks, but just when he has convinced himself that he must have misheard, he hears Janet hiss quietly: “Shh, Carol, we don’t talk about that.”
Part of him thinks about turning back around, ask what the hell they are talking about. But the bags on his arm are heavy, and he wants to get home to Sam, and then he is busy stuffing the groceries into the backseat awkwardly while his bad leg is threatening to give out underneath him, and it isn’t until he lets himself sink into the driver’s seat, short of breath and dripping sweat, that it hits him: when Carol mentioned his husband, she was talking about Sam.
Sam is hovering on the gallery by the entrance when Dean pushes the door to the bunker open, and Dean wonders if Sam has just been sitting on the staircase, fretting and staring at his phone, ever since Dean left about an hour and a half ago.
“How was it,” Sam asks, clearly aiming for casual, but Dean can hear the anxious tension in his voice, and oh yes, Sam was fretting while he was gone alright.
Before Dean can even think to respond, Sam is taking the grocery bags from Dean’s hand, slips the handles over his wrist, lifts them like they weigh nothing, even as Dean staggers, his balance thrown off by the sudden shift in weight.
This is what it has come to, he thinks not entirely without bitterness. The great Dean Winchester, reduced to a farce: returning home from the dangerous hunt for dairy and coffee grounds, his baby brother rushing to take the heavy burden off his weary shoulders because these days he can’t even lift a pen without feeling like he’s about to collapse.
Briefly he thinks about lying in response to Sam’s question, to preserve what little is left of his dignity – but he’s too tired for that, and hell, Sam knows him well enough to see right through him anyway. Sam who has always understood him better than anyone, Sam who has seen him at his worst more times than he can count, Sam who spent weeks watching him lie in a hospital bed with a catheter stuck in his dick and a tube down his throat.
“Next time you are coming along,” he mumbles grudgingly, and watches Sam’s face soften in response, settle into an expression of naked fondness that Dean has been getting to see more and more often these days. Every now and then, he tells himself that he needs to stop trying to provoke this look, needs to stop chasing it, because this isn’t the kind of thing he can afford getting addicted to – but he’s an invalid, worn-out and old at barely 48, fully dependent on his brother’s care, and for the rest of his life this look is pretty much all he’s going to get.
“Good timing by the way,” Sam says now, grocery bags dangling from his wrist. “I just made a fresh pot of coffee. You wanna go ahead to your room, wash up? I’ll bring some up for us in a minute.”
And that, too, is said so casually, as if he just came up with it, but Sam is not the only one who knows his brother, Dean can read Sam just as well – he is fully aware that Sam made the coffee because painkillers and alcohol don’t mix and Dean desperately misses his beer; knows that Sam is using the coffee as an excuse to put the groceries away; knows that Sam has no illusions that Dean might actually wash or change anytime soon because he will just barely make it to his room before Sam returns with the coffee tray.
It shouldn’t bother him, he thinks as he limps down the hallway at a snail’s pace, the click-clack of his cane echoing in the corridor, the way Sam is so transparent about all the small things he does to take care of Dean. It’s just that Dean lived for so many years with the certainty that Sam was his to take care of that he doesn’t know what to do with himself now that the roles are so obviously reversed.
Or perhaps it’s the fact that unlike him, Sam doesn’t seem to struggle with the change in their dynamic, doesn’t seem to mind. And Dean shouldn’t be surprised – he has watched Sam take care of other people ever since he was a kid, it’s always come naturally to him – but it’s something else entirely to see him take so easily to caring for Dean, almost like he has been doing it for years … and perhaps, Dean thinks, he has been, and Dean just wasn’t in a place to see.
It’s still on his mind when he’s halfway through his coffee, a good forty minutes later. He is sitting on his bed, propped up against the headboard, a pillow under his left hip and his leg stretched out in front of him, waiting for his meds to fully kick in. Sam is in the chair by the desk across the room, and the TV is running in the background, but neither of them is paying it much attention, and Dean wouldn’t even be able to say what was playing before the commercial break came on.
“You okay?” Sam asks finally, over the sound of a woman announcing the benefits of Tylenol Rapid Release. Dean thinks perhaps he should be starring in the commercial instead. He knows all about the benefits and side effects of Tylenol. Hell, he might as well count Tylenol among the five food groups at this point.
“You have been quiet since you got back. Something happen?”
Dean shrugs, winces when the movement sends a stab of pain down his side, then carefully sets his cup down on the table next to the bed, because even holding a mug for too long is exhausting to him now.
“Apparently the ladies at the grocery store think you are my wife,” he blurts out, and then cringes inwardly because that wasn’t really what he had meant to say – in fact, he hadn’t really planned on bringing it up at all, but he has learned the hard way that oxycodone and muscle relaxants tend to fuck with his verbal filters, and over the past weeks he has caught himself saying a lot of things that he worries might have been better left unsaid.
Sam blinks at the unexpected announcement, then grimaces at Dean’s choice of words. “They ring up my shaving cream and deodorant every week,” he says dryly. “I’m pretty sure they know I’m not your wife.”
“That’s the part you get stuck on?” Dean asks, incredulously. “Instead of, I don’t know, the part where they think we are married?”
Sam shrugs and looks away. “It’s not like it’s the first time, is it?” he says quietly, and Dean frowns, a little impatiently.
“Yeah, sure,” he waves Sam off, “but usually not people that we – wait,” he says abruptly, when what Sam is saying – or not saying – fully sinks in.
“You knew,” he says indignantly. He makes a half-hearted effort to push himself upright, but his hip refuses to cooperate. “You already knew. How long have you known?”
Sam is still not looking at him. “Couple of years, I think?” he says finally, and Dean stares in disbelief.
“Years?” he says slowly. “So, what, the whole town has been convinced that we are married for years and … you didn’t think that was worth mentioning?”
He doesn’t mean for it to come out like an accusation, is mostly just trying to make sense of it, but as always when he’s feeling overwhelmed, his voice gains a sharp edge anyway, and Sam clearly hears it too, because his shoulders drop, and he is still not looking Dean in the eye.
“There wasn’t much to tell,” he says tiredly. “I didn’t really –” He glances up at last, catches Dean’s gaze, unhappy and determined at once.
“Look,” he says. “We live together, we use the same last name, we don’t have … partners,” he continues awkwardly. “This is a small town in rural Kansas. I guess people just started assuming that that the brother thing was a cover for … you know. And – well. When it first came up, I didn’t dissuade them, because I figured at the very least it would keep them from asking too many uncomfortable questions about what we are up to in our daily lives.”
He shrugs, gives Dean a wry little smile. “And it did. Guess people around here think that if you are gay, some … eccentricities are to be expected. Even if that means having machetes in your trunk and a pentagram tattoo.”
“Right.” Dean lets that sink in for a moment, feels things falling into place as old memories are rearranging themselves in his head.
“So this is why Tina was pissed at me,” he says slowly, and Sam gives him a look that is apprehensive and curious both.
“Tina? The waitress at the diner? I don’t –”
“It was just a bit of harmless flirting,” Dean says, out of reflex, not quite sure why he feels the impulse to defend himself.
“None of your flirting qualifies as harmless,” Sam retorts, and it’s a familiar, expected comeback, but somehow it sounds stilted, reluctant, as if Sam’s heart isn’t really in it this time.
“I don’t remember that, though,” he continues, his face shifting into a suspicious frown. “I don’t even remember the last time she took care of our table, even before – ”
“Yeah, and this is why,” Dean sighs. “Stupid. Last year, you were … uh, you went to help Garth out with the twins, and I – it’s boring to eat lunch at a diner alone, you know? So I tried to, I don’t know, make small talk, I suppose. But she got mad at me. Stormed off. Sent Mark over with my order.” He shakes his head at the memory, laughs a little. “I thought I said something offensive. But she probably just thought I was stepping out on you.”
“Huh,” Sam makes. Dean has a hard time reading his expression. “That’s kind of sweet.”
“Sweet my ass,” Dean grumbles and tries once more to actually get comfortable in his seat. “She’s been ignoring me ever since.”
Sam gives him a speculative look. “I can’t quite tell if you are mad because you didn’t get laid or because she thinks you are a cheater.”
“I am not mad,” Dean protests. “I’m just – I don’t know. I guess I just wish I’d known so that I could have –”
He shrugs vaguely. Feels a little unsettled, disoriented, like he is moving on treacherous ground, and he can’t even say if it’s the strange conversation they are having or just the meds messing with his mind. He leans sideways to pull the pillow out from underneath his body, and only realizes his mistake when the pain shoots like a burning fuse all the way from his sacrum down to the tips of his toes.
“Fuck,” he groans, lets his head drop backwards against the headboard in a desperate, pointless attempt to relieve the cramping muscles in his thigh. He grits his teeth, squeezes his eyes shut against the tears he feels burning under his lids, and then opens them again when a gentle hand settles on his shin.
“Hey,” Sam says, now perched on the edge of the bed next to Dean’s legs, forehead folded up in concern.
“You okay?”
“Do I look like I’m okay?” Dean snaps and immediately feels like an asshole. But Sam doesn’t rise to the bait, doesn’t even look particularly offended, and Dean thinks it’s a testament to how long they’ve been doing this dance that Sam knows exactly when Dean is genuinely in pain and when he’s just being a dick.
“Sorry,” he says anyway, because this isn’t Sam’s fault either way. “Just. My leg is killing me.”
“Meds not helping?” Sam asks worriedly, his hand big and warm on Dean’s leg.
“They are helping,” Dean grunts, “just not enough.” He groans. “You were right, okay? There, I said it. I shouldn’t have gone into town alone.” He grimaces.
“Fuck. I’m just tired of not being able to do a single thing on my own.”
“Yeah,” Sam says quietly, and then is silent for a while before he asks, in a very different tone: “You want me to do your leg?”
For a moment, Dean seriously considers saying no – he is already feeling too exposed, too vulnerable after the conversation they just had, and allowing Sam to help him slip off his jeans and set his large, strong hands on Dean’s scarred skin is not exactly going to help.
But his entire side is an endless landing strip of pain, dulled but not muted by the painkillers in his system. The mere thought of a massage is almost enough to make Dean’s eyes roll back in bliss, so he nods and then looks away when Sam leans in to unzip his pants.
Even getting the jeans off is an exercise in frustration, but Sam is smart enough not to bring up the sweatpants again that he thinks Dean should be wearing when he leaves the house – instead simply wriggles the denim down Dean’s legs one inch at a time while Dean half-heartedly tries to help but mostly tries not to scream in agony.
Eventually Sam sets the jeans to the side at the foot of the bed, then reaches for the lotion they keep on the side table for this very purpose, warms some of it between his hands. His fingers are gentle when they finally come to rest just on the outside of Dean’s hipbone, where the surgical scar cuts a neat, straight line through the network of jagged scar tissue from the crash.
Leave it to Sam to take it upon himself to become the world’s best massage therapist after a long conversation with one of the doctors, shortly before Dean got released. Even on a bad day like this one, when the meds don’t do anything but make him feel loopy and slow, Sam will be able to work out the worst of the knots in his muscles and soften the aching scar tissue covering his leg. Just like the affectionate looks Sam now seems to dole out so generously, Sam’s massages are something Dean could easily get addicted to, and that is also what makes them dangerous.
“Sorry,” Sam suddenly says, and Dean glances up in surprise, but Sam is not actually looking at him. His gaze is directed downward, focused on the patterns his hands are drawing on Dean’s leg, but his expression is almost embarrassed. Tired. A little sad.
“When you were –” He shrugs awkwardly, silently, as if he still can’t bring himself to even name the thing that changed their lives so dramatically a good seven months ago, even as he’s touching the visible, tangible evidence with his bare hands.
“People were … nice,” Sam says eventually, and smooths his palm down the curve of Dean’s thigh. “Gave me casserole in Tupperware. Said they were praying for you.” He laughs sharply at the thought. “I just said thank you. But. I was kind of – lonely, you know?”
Dean closes his eyes, clenches his teeth. Doesn’t want to imagine it, the way Sam must have been while Dean’s life was hanging in the balance. Doesn’t want to think about how often he’s come back, back from the dead or worse, each time a little warier, a little more terrified of what he was going to find. Doesn’t want to think about Sam with that dead, crazy look in his eyes after Gabriel messed with them way back when; doesn’t want to think about Sam hooked up on demon blood, or lost in a strange fantasy world with a girl and a dog, or gaunt and emaciated, a walking corpse himself.
Every time he had told himself that he wasn’t going to let it happen again, not until he knew that Sam would be alright without him there. And for a few years there, after Chuck had finally been defeated, he had actually managed to stick to his plan, until one day a sudden tornado had dropped a truck on him, and as he lay bleeding out on the pavement, he was convinced that this was going to be it.
And then he woke up again – no Jack, no angels, no reapers, no re-dos, just good old-fashioned medicine, who would have thought – and Sam was sitting in a tiny chair by his bed, looking decades older than he was, teary-eyed and shaky and thin, and Dean wondered just how bad it had been this time.
Bad, was the answer, that much became clear, when he finally was able to hold a phone and started getting calls from people they knew, people who inquired about his wellbeing but somehow seemed almost as concerned about Sam.
Why didn’t you ask Garth for help, Dean felt tempted to ask, why didn’t you have Claire drive up and give you a bit of a break, but he knew the answer to that question already, and so he kept quiet and focused on getting better instead.
“It was easier when it was strangers somehow, you know?” Sam says now, answering the question Dean never asked, and it sounds almost like he’s confessing a sin. “I didn’t want them to stop doing what they were doing. So I may have …” He coughs. “… gently encouraged their misconception. Perhaps that’s why now they are more … you know. Why they think it’s okay to mention.” He swallows.
“But I should have told you from the beginning. I – uhm. I didn’t know you had your eyes set on the hot waitress, or I would have done it differently.”
He sounds contrite, far more than the situation warrants, and Dean shakes his head even though Sam's eyes are still averted and he won't be able to see.
“Hey,” he says, and waits until Sam actually looks at him. “No big deal. I’m glad someone made you casserole while I wasn’t around to make sure you ate.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “I can feed myself,” he says impatiently, a blatant lie. “But Tina –”
He breaks off, and Dean understands what Sam is thinking but doesn’t want to say outright: that Tina the waitress was Dean’s last chance at having something uncomplicated, a final fun little fling before the truck shattered his pelvis and left thigh, something athletic and virile.
“Doesn’t matter,” he says gruffly, cutting off whatever else Sam might be tempted to say. He shrugs, looks up into Sam’s unhappy, stricken face.
“Wasn’t going to do anything about it anyway.”
Sam frowns doubtfully, but the thing is, it’s not a lie. Dean remembers sitting in the diner, feeling awkward about taking up a bench all by himself, bored because he had told himself not to text Sam again for at least another hour. He had tried to strike up a conversation with his waitress out of sheer frustration – but he had had no intention of pulling her into the employee restroom, or waiting for her to take her lunch break, or any of the other things he might have done a long, long time ago. Even if she had been more amenable to his advances, he would have given her a smile and a big tip and gone home alone, and it wasn’t just because he wanted to be able to come eat at the diner again.
He tries to remember the last time he even got off with someone other than his right hand and comes up blank. Perhaps that case with the evil goat in Wisconsin, which would mean it’s been almost a decade, and not necessarily for lack of opportunity – it just never felt quite right. But looking too closely at the reasons was something he very much tried to avoid, and so he pushed it aside and jerked off in the shower and resigned himself to the fact that with every passing year his fantasies became more and more limited to images of broad shoulders and three-day scruff.
“I wasn’t going to do anything,” he repeats now, a little helplessly, already dreading Sam’s response. There was a time when he and Sam would have teased each other about getting old, about losing their touch, but they both know that now those jokes would fall flat, and Dean is half-prepared for the kind of look he has become far too familiar with in the past months, the sad, guilty expression that makes Dean want to tear his own hair out with predictable regularity.
But instead, Sam ducks his head shyly, as if embarrassed, and when he finally glances up at him, there is that nakedly fond look again, hitting Dean like a punch to the gut.
“You weren’t?” Sam asks, and there’s a strange undertone in his voice – hesitant, almost hopeful, as if Dean’s answer actually matters to him.
“No,” Dean says, a little shakily, and tries to breathe through the sudden tightness in his chest.
“Oh,” Sam says, inanely. “Good.” He clears his throat, and if Dean didn’t know better, he’d say that there is a faint blush creeping up Sam’s neck. “That’s good.”
“Yeah,” Dean says slowly. The room suddenly feels a little too hot, the air thin. “Good.”
For a moment, Sam looks like there’s something else he wants to say, but instead he falls silent, directing his full attention back to Dean’s thigh. And Dean tries to stay alert and composed, but Sam’s hands on his leg are radiating warmth and comfort and make him realize just how exhausted and drained he is from his trip into town. Eventually he admits defeat, lets his head roll back against the wall, gives himself over to Sam’s ministrations, eyes half closed, just hums appreciatively when Sam digs his thumbs into the deep scars high up on his thigh, just this side of too painful – and then suddenly freezes in horror when he feels something stir low in his groin that he’d almost given up on ever feeling again.
As if on cue, the movements of Sam’s hands slow, then stop entirely, and Dean’s eyes fly open, wary of what he’s going to find. Sure enough, Sam is looking down at the space between them with an unreadable expression on his face, and when he follows Sam’s gaze, he sees what Sam must have noticed, the inconvenient, unmistakable evidence that apparently he’s not yet quite dead. He isn’t even hard, not really, but his cock is full and heavy, outline clearly visible against the fabric of his boxer shorts, decidedly more interested than it has been since before the crash.
And it’s not even like this is truly a surprise. He can barely remember a time when thinking of Sam’s hands on his skin wasn’t a surefire way to get him hot, and hell, he has long made his grudging peace with the fact that for years now, his little brother has been pretty much the only person that really turns him on. But he usually has a better grip on his responses when he isn’t drugged to the gills, and it’s just his luck that after months of wondering whether his cock ever was going to rise to the occasion again, the first time it happens is when Sam is right there to witness it.
He feels the panic trying to claw its way out of his chest, frantically tries to come up with an explanation, tries to think of an excuse that won’t sound transparent and contrived, but before he can bring up anything in his defense, Sam raises his head and looks at Dean from dark eyes.
“You kissed me,” he says wonderingly, and Dean forgets how to breathe. After months of anxious fretting, he had finally started to believe that Sam might have forgotten – had halfway convinced himself that he had made the whole thing up – but of course it was too much to hope that Sam wouldn’t remember, too much to hope that Sam would just never bring it up.
“No I didn’t,” he says instinctively, feels heat rise in his cheeks, cringes when he sees Sam’s face fall at his denial. His brother looks annoyed, the way he does when he can see through Dean’s bullshit and is done with it – but more than that, he looks hurt, and Dean’s doesn’t know what to make of that.
“Dean …” Sam sighs, a weary, tired sound. A plea.
Dean swallows thickly, drops his gaze. At least his cock has gone back to being as disengaged as it has been for the past months, and Dean isn’t sure whether he’s disappointed or relieved.
“I thought I was going to die,” he finally says roughly, not quite an admission, and Sam sighs again.
“Yes,” he says, pointedly. “So did I. But you didn’t. You kissed me and you didn’t die and then you never mentioned it again and I just –”
He breaks off, then, looks at Dean imploringly, as if he hopes that Dean already knows what he is trying to say. But Dean’s mind feels sluggish, fogged up by the drugs and too caught up in the horror of having his most damning slip-up dragged out in the open like this, too terrified of the fallout this might bring to do anything but sit and stare and wait for the axe to come down on his neck.
Eventually, Sam’s shoulders slump, and Dean sees disappointment wash across his face, but then his expression is replaced with something more determined, even fatalistic maybe. His palm on Dean’s thigh flexes briefly, as if he is the one in need of support, then he leans forward, slowly, carefully, and finally it hits Dean what Sam is about to do.
He recoils violently, feels a stab of pain in his leg at the sudden movement even as his head slams against the headboard behind him with a hollow thump.
“Don’t you dare!” he snaps, heart hammering in his chest, and watches confusion, then shock, then heartbreak dim the light in Sam’s eyes.
Sam hunches his shoulders, curls up into himself, the way he only does when he’s genuinely ashamed. It’s been a long while since Dean has seen that look on him and he hates himself for being the one to bring it back after all this time, but he feels backed into a corner, feels fear pulsing in his veins, and he needs to stop this before Sam can go any further and do something he will later certainly regret.
“Don’t – just don’t,” he grits out, flat palm held up and turned outwards between them like a shield. “I know you are feeling sorry because – because of this – because of Tina – and you think you can give me something I want but this isn’t –”
He breaks off, gulps down ragged breaths, and resists the urge to bury his face in his hands.
Sam stares at him, incredulously. “What are you talking about?” he says slowly, frustration and hurt warring in his eyes.
“What do you think this is? You think this is me offering my crippled brother some kind of pity fuck?”
Dean winces at the brutal jab, then sticks his chin out defiantly. “Well, isn’t it?” he asks harshly, and Sam laughs, but it’s an unhappy, hollow sound.
“Do you even know anymore just how often I’ve watched you die?” he asks, and there’s genuine anger simmering in his voice. “Every time it felt like part of me was dying too. And I thought, foolishly, that we were done with all that … and then suddenly I had to pull you out from underneath a truck, and I was holding you on a highway in the pouring rain and I thought you were dying in my arms. Again. I sat by your bed while you were in a coma and prayed to any deity I could think of, and no one answered my calls. I’ve been with you every step since you came home, I have –”
“Exactly,” Dean growls, because this, this right here is the point. “Five months ago, you were feeding me Jell-O with a spoon. It’s been like, what, six weeks since I stopped calling for you every time I wanted to use the bathroom because I couldn’t pull my pants up by myself. I still can’t take a shower without your help. You really think I believe that you wouldn’t do this too, if you told yourself it’s what I need?”
Sam reels back like he’s been slapped. “You think I do these things because I believe I have to?” he asks, in disbelief. “After everything, after all these years, all the shit we went through, and you still don’t get that I am here because I want to be?”
“But that was before,” Dean says helplessly, desperate to make Sam see. He curls his hands into fists on the sheets, nails digging painfully into the flesh of his palms. “You weren’t – I’m the one who is supposed to take care of you.”
“Oh, shut up,” Sam says angrily and pushes himself up from the bed. In two long steps he is by the door and for a moment, it looks as if he is going to walk out without another word, but then he turns around, hand on the handle, one foot in the hall.
“If you don’t want it, just say so,” he says. His face is drained of color, except for two spots of red blooming on his cheekbones, making him look ethereal, feverish.
“I’m not going to leave you, one way or another, unless you actually want me to go. But you do not get to play martyr about this. You were the one who kissed me when you thought you were on your way out, and I had no way of knowing whether you were going to live.” He takes a deep breath. “And just to be clear, I want this. All of it. I want to leave the house and have people think that I’m your husband. I want to act like it. Hell, most days I feel like I already do, in all ways except one. And I want that too. Pity has nothing to do with it. This isn’t about me feeling bad for you. This is about having to live with knowing how close I came again to losing you. This is about us getting too damn old to waste our time with bullshitting ourselves.”
“Sam –” Dean starts, sounding lost to his own ears, not sure how to go on.
Sam shakes his head, drags a hand over his damp eyes, leaving messy tear tracks smeared across his face, and then he is out the door and gone.
Dean curses and tries to swing his legs over the edge of the bed before his hip reminds him, emphatically, that this is not one of his active features at this point, and with a pained, angry groan, he sinks back into the bed.
“Sam!” he shouts instead, as loudly as he can. “Don’t you fucking go where I can’t follow you, damnit! Don’t you leave!”
And really, he is just talking about the freaking staircase, but his voice cracks somewhere in the middle of the sentence, and his eyes are burning, and perhaps this is about more than just Sam hiding in the kitchen after all.
For a moment, there is silence, nothing but his own harsh breathing over the sound of his heart drumming in his chest. Then he hears soft footsteps, coming closer instead of disappearing, and eventually Sam’s face appears around the corner of the doorway, looking anxious and contrite.
“Get your ass over here, bitch,” Dean says gruffly. Sam doesn’t move, and Dean wonders if he’s just going to balk after all, if Dean has already fucked this up – but finally he pushes away from the door, slides into the room, sits down again on the bed next to Dean, a lot more gingerly, stiffly this time, keeping his head bowed like a man convicted, and Dean can’t stand to see him like this.
“It scares me sometimes,” Dean says roughly, and Sam’s head flies up, his eyes wide.
“How much I want you. It’s the only thing –” He shrugs, bites his lip. “I kept asking you to follow me places I should never have asked you to follow me, but you always stayed. But this? I never thought I’d have this, and it was alright. I was fine with what we had. And now you are stuck with me. Stuck with taking care of me, and I’m – ”
– useless, he doesn’t say, though from the way Sam’s eyes go tight and disapproving, he hears it loud and clear anyway.
“Dean,” he says quietly. “That’s not – you know I want you any way I can have you.”
“Yeah,” Dean says hoarsely. “I’m starting to realize that. And that scares me too.”
He reaches out then, takes Sam’s hand. It’s big and warm and strong against his palm, and trembling faintly under his touch.
“I guess this means I’m gonna have to buy you a ring,” he says, and traces the length of Sam’s ring finger, up and down. Imagines a broad silver band, maybe with an engraving inside.
“What?” Sam asks tonelessly, and Dean grins, even if it comes out a little wobbly still.
“If you want to convince people we are married,” he says, turns Sam’s hand over, touches his heartline with the pad of his thumb. “We should have rings.”
“Right,” Sam says faintly, looking back and forth between their joined hands and Dean’s face, as if he still thinks that this is a joke. But when Dean links their fingers and tugs gently, Sam follows easily, shifting around on the bed until they are so close that their noses brush.
The last time they were face to face like this, Dean thought he was dying, and Sam’s face was a mask of terror and grief.
Now, his eyes are reflecting tentative hope and trepidation, and that addictive gleam of open affection that Dean finally lets himself see for what it really means.
“Hey,” he says, ridiculously, feeling anxious and giddy and a little bit insane.
“Do you have any idea how long I’ve been thinking about this?”
Sam huffs gently, his exhale a caress on Dean’s lips. “I think I can imagine,” he says softly, and Dean has to kiss him then, at last.
When their lips slide together, they both breathe a sigh. Dean presses in, feels Sam’s mouth yield to his advance, and suddenly he wants everything: wants to swallow down Sam’s moans, wants to taste the smile curling up the corners of his mouth, wants to wrap himself around him and hold on and just never, ever let go.
“Christ,” he groans when they finally break apart, their foreheads pressed together, Sam’s hand on his jaw and Dean's fingers playing with Sam's collar in the back of his neck.
“Three decades,” he says against Sam’s lips. “I had three decades to come up with every possible variation of all the things I’ve wanted to do to you.” He laughs quietly, a little bitterly, at the irony. “And now we are here and I know that you want it and I’m – I can’t even really get it up.”
“Stop it,” Sam says, and kisses him quickly, chastely, like a husband, but when Dean looks into his eyes, they are dark with desire, and Dean feels a spark low in his spine.
“We’ll get there in time,” Sam says, and it sounds like a promise.
“I know it feels like we wasted a lifetime. But the truth is, we finally have all the time in the world.”