#a random ficlet for episode 311

[zmediaoutlet]

Sam’s not sleeping when Dean pulls off the road. “What,” Sam says, although without a lot of interest. State highway after midnight and exactly no one to see, but Dean coasts down the gravel shoulder to the pitted asphalt-and-dirt road that turns off into—sparse woods, a sign that says NO HUNTING. Sam snorts.

“Gotta take five,” Dean says. Sam nods, arms folded over his chest. Shadow-shapes in the dark, his eyes slanted away at some terrible inward thing. Out of the car there’s moonlight peeking through the tree-tops and Dean left the headlights on, so he doesn’t trip and break his neck on his way to water a patch of weeds. He zips up and then stands there, breathing. Dirt and mulch. Kinda acrid now but not any worse than the woods usually are. Not that different from where they’d buried the vampire kid—god, less than six hours ago. Soft dirt there and they’d made a good grave, burned him right, covered the charred bones. Sam hardly looking at him then, too. Like finishing the hunt hurt as much as sitting around thinking about the other dead kid had.

Dean hasn’t got much in his back pocket, when it comes to making Sam feel better. They’ve been doing this so long they’ve got rhythms they follow and he knows that he’s—tough, sometimes, and he can be a real pain, and Sam always seems to have some way to grip Dean by the wrist and pull him up and be solid as mountain rock for Dean to brace against. He doesn’t have a roadmap for when the rock starts to slide under his feet. He can say some of the dumb crap he’d offer to civilians but Sam’s too smart for it to work; he can offer work, or duty if work itself doesn’t do the trick, but Sam’s never felt the pull of that the same way Dean has, and if Dean’s honest he’d be freaked if Sam really bought it. With how Sam’s been talking Dean’d be willing to throw on Steel Magnolias and give him a foot massage if he thought it’d help, but it wouldn’t, and he doesn’t have much left to offer, to try to make it—not fixed. Fixing it isn’t something he’s been able to do since he was five years old and everything went wrong. But maybe it could be—

He comes back to the car and opens the trunk, instead. Then to the passenger side, where he opens Sam’s door, and Sam looks up at him narrow-eyed but not frowning. Tired. Sad, which makes Dean’s throat do something weird, and he clears it before he says, rougher than he means, “You gotta piss or anything?”

“No,” Sam says, tilting it like Dean’s the weird one. Well, fair enough.

Dean nods. He twists the cap on the bottle he fetched and takes a long burning swallow. Sam shakes his head when Dean holds it out but Dean waggles it at him, and Sam’s not yet so oatmeal-hippie-health conscious that he won’t have a drink with Dean on the wrong side of dawn. His lips pull back like it stings. “Good value for fifteen bucks,” Dean says, and Sam raises his eyebrows, and Dean crouches then in the open door, puts his hand on Sam’s leg. Curling his fingers around the inside of Sam’s knee.

They’ve been doing this so long, they’ve got rhythms. Sam’s chin tips down. “I don’t…” he starts, but he bites his lip and breathes in long and slow through his nose and Dean doesn’t know what he would say, anyway. That it was too fucked up, that he missed all the people they’d lost, that the dark was so heavy it had this velvet choking intensity, so bleak no light could ever get through. Pick a number.

But Dean’s left the headlights on. He pulls, and Sam swivels on the seat so his bootheels crunch in the gravel, and Dean settles down on his knees and reaches up and puts his hand on Sam’s face, and watches Sam close his eyes. His jaw clenching. Stubble thick and sharp and his face as hollow as it was when Jack—when—

Dean unbuckles Sam’s belt. The button, the zip, and once he smacks Sam’s hip he lifts up enough so Dean can yank everything down. He’s soft but so what. Dean’s worked with worse. He spreads his hands over Sam’s bare thighs, hair prickling in the autumn air, licks his mouth wet, and when he takes Sam in it’s—everything familiar, good. Gravel biting into his knees through his jeans. He tongues under the soft ridge of the head, breathes through his nose. The rarity of getting to go down to the base without choking, suckling soft, salt under his tongue and the bitter of a long day and Sam’s fingers sliding through his hair, holding the back of his neck so careful. Like Dean will get hurt, doing this thing he’s been doing as long as his life has been worth anything. Like Dean’s doing Sam a favor, here, when he’s split halfway between wanting Sam to stop thinking and wanting his own brain blank as a snowfield.

A weird strangled breath, above. Dean slurps back and kisses Sam’s hipbone, and drags his shirt up and kisses his belly, hair prickling his lips. “Let me,” he says, asking for—a lot, maybe—and Sam doesn’t say anything but his thumb drags up into the soft hollow at the top of Dean’s spine and his thighs tip wider. Dean presses his forehead to Sam’s stomach. Weirdly grateful, in a way he can’t ever say aloud. This one good thing. Then he pushes Sam to sprawl back across the bench seat, and holds Sam’s hips in his hands, and takes his brother into his throat.