Your brother smiles at you around a mouthful of blood and you think, this is our life. This is the nightmare that keeps us awake at night. This is the reward we get for saving the human race.
Your brother smiles at you around a mouthful of blood, and you wonder when you stopped caring about the way it stains his teeth. When did it stop making you feel sick? When did it start feeling normal?
Your brother smiles at you around a mouthful of blood, and you want nothing more than to lick it clean, to kiss into his mouth until it doesn’t taste of copper anymore.
Your brother smiles at you around a mouthful of blood, and you smile right back, because this is your nightmare and this is your reward.
Tag: ficlet
Dean doesn’t cry when Sam left for Stanford. He wants to, but he doesn’t. It feels so unrealistic that his brain needs time to realise it, to realise that his little brother, his lover, isn’t here. That he left him.
It happens four months after that night. Dean just got back from a pretty rough hunt, and while he’s searching for a new clean shirt after his shower, he sees it – Sam’s hoodie.
They did it the first time Dean left Sam to go hunting. Sam couldn’t stop crying, begging Dean not to go, not to leave him. As a compromise, Dean left him one of his shirt to him.“So you see Sammy, like that, I’m still’ with you. I’m protecting you, even if I’m far away”
Sam didn’t look convinced at first, but he was able to sleep at night and that was still something.
So they keep doing that. Each time a different shirt, hoddie, jeans and, years later, even panties.
Then Sam started putting some of his clothes in Dean’s bag. They never really talk about it, but they didn’t need to.
It was a promise of coming home, of being together again. When you live that life, you don’t own a lot of things. So giving away some clothes is actually big deal, for them anyway.
So finding Sam’s hoodie in his bag – it’s just too much for him.
He starts crying, screaming like a wild animal, cursing whoever did this, whoever put his brother away from him, hating on Sam, hating on himself, wishing he was enough – God, just let him be enough
He ends up sleeping on the floor, Sam’s hoodie around him like a protecting.Miles away, Sam is crying in Dean Led Zeppelin shirt, his brother smell barely noticeable now.
It’s a promise of love and of coming back.
Ficlet: Of flesh and blood I’m made
Dean’s body was rebuilt when he was raised from Hell, but Sam’s wasn’t. What if, once he got his soul and his memory back, his body couldn’t forget what had happened in Hell? How high would his pain threshold be?
~~~
“I’m just going to tuck this warmed blanket around you,” she says. (Ashley, her name is Ashley; the whiteboard on the wall across from him says Baptist Medical Center Emergency Department and Your nurse is Ashley and Today is Wednesday the 22nd and other things they think he wants to know.)
(You are topside. That’s what Sam wants to know.)
“I know you’ve got to be freezing,” she continues. (Ashley, she’s Ashley. Remember. Focus.) He looks at her, puzzled. Freezing? He’s a little cold, maybe, but not uncomfortably so. Falling into a frozen lake isn’t cold. Not like the feeling of Lucifer pressed against him, hand plunged into his chest and curled possessively around his heart, turning his blood to ice in his veins. Compared to that, nothing up here is actually cold.
Behind Ashley, Dean raises his eyebrows briefly and then looks pointedly at the skin of his exposed arm. Oh. Goosebumps. Empirical evidence that he is, in fact, cold. But that’s good. Empirical data is good. It’s better than trying to guess what he’s feeling.
“Thanks, Ashley,” he says. He smiles. He is okay. He is okay.
“Now, how bad is your pain, on a scale of one to ten? If one is no pain at all, and ten is the worst pain you can imagine, where would you put your current level of pain?”
(He doesn’t imagine, he remembers, and he is struck dumb with the effort of not remembering.)
When he doesn’t immediately answer, Ashley says “It’s okay. Don’t worry that we’re not going to give you anything if you don’t give us the right number. My goal is for you to have no pain at all. So, if one is no pain, and ten is being boiled in oil, how much pain are you in right now?
On the whiteboard, a row of cartoon faces demonstrates pain levels one through ten. Face number one is smiling, happy. Face number ten has a mouth curved down into a dramatic frown, fat cartoon tears leaking from its eyes.
(Its eyes have not been gouged out. Its mouth is not stretched open in a desperate agonized scream.)
Ashley doesn’t know what being boiled in oil feels like, and neither does face number ten, but Sam does. If being boiled in oil is a ten on Ashley’s scale, having your spine ripped out through your mouth must be a fifteen. Having slivers of glass scrape down every nerve in your body simultaneously is a twenty.
(Sam can count very, very high.)
How does this scale calibrate to real pain? What is a broken arm supposed to feel like? Should falling through ice into a frozen lake afterward make it hurt more, or less?
Behind Ashley (her name makes him shudder, ash and brimstone and fire and ice and claws and teeth), Dean clears his throat, holds his hands at waist level. Five fingers extended on his left hand, one on his right.
“Six,” Sam says. “I’m at a six.” Dean smiles, gives him a quick nod. (You are topside.)
Face number six isn’t smiling. Sam fixes his mouth into a slight frown to match face number six.
“All right,” Ashley says. “I’m going to talk to the doc, and he’ll order something for your pain. Then we’ll get you in for X-rays.”
Sam nods, tries to concentrate on the distant ache of his broken bones and not the sharp sense-memory of being burned boiled skewered shattered dismembered.
“Thank you, Ashley.”
He is okay.
~~~
(Inspired by a nurse who actually used the “boiled in oil” analogy. The title is from “Human” by The Human League .)
Whatever you do, don’t think about Sam walking away from home after the big blowout with John, tears in his eyes, refusing to look back because he has to be strong.
Don’t think about Sam’s first night alone, spending it on a bus that had seen better days, springs digging into his back as he tries to get comfortable.
Don’t think about Sam at a payphone dialing his brother’s number, listening to it ring, so close to begging to come back but hanging up before he could answer because this is the choice he made and he has to see it through.
Just don’t think about Sam being alone for the first time in his life with nothing but a duffle bag and a few crumpled up dollar bills.
It starts when Sam is seventeen years old and starting to get too big for Dean’s secondhand clothes. He’s lanky, lacking muscle mass after a series of quick growth spurts, and Dean’s old clothes are short on him, leaving his wrists and ankles uncomfortably exposed. Eventually, they scrape together some spare cash and manage to buy him some bigger clothes that are all his own, and though Dean kind of misses seeing Sam in his things, Sam seems happier for it, and Dean takes some comfort in that.
It’s a nasty cold that comes over Dean in the winter months, leaving him aching from head to toe and constantly shivering. All he wants to do is curl up in bed and stay there until he gets better or dies, but he forces himself to at least take a hot shower on his way there, trying to ward off the insistent pounding at the front of his skull.
One of Sam’s new hoodies happens to be thrown over the back of a chair as Dean shuffles his way back to bed, and he grabs it impulsively, pulling it over his head for the extra bit of warmth. As expected, it’s big on him, the sleeves falling down over his knuckles, and maybe that’s the part that has him immediately feeling a little better.
When Sam gets home from school and finds Dean wearing his hoodie, burrowed deep in bed with a pile of tissues at his side, he raises his eyebrows. “You better not get your germs all over that.”
Dean responds by snuggling down a little further into the nest he’s built himself, only feeling a tiny bit guilty for stealing the sweater in the first place. He washes it before giving it back to his brother, and promises himself that he’ll stick to his own clothes from here on out.
Things don’t turn out quite that way. The next time Dean finds himself laid up in bed, it’s after a particularly rough hunt; a ghoul has taken a chunk out of his leg, and he’s bruised all over from being thrown around by the thing. After getting patched up, Dean’s left to recover for a couple weeks, and the first time he gets up to grab himself a snack-
Well. Sam’s bag is open by the other bed, and one of his hoodies is sitting right on top, tossed aside by his brother after a long day, and Dean can’t quite help himself.
It’s something that carries through the years, and Dean never really grows out of the habit once it’s established. There’s something about wearing Sam’s clothes, big and comfortable as they are, that makes him feel better whenever he needs a little bit of comfort. Maybe it’s the way they make him feel small and safe, sleeves falling down over his hands when he doesn’t make an effort to roll them up, or maybe it’s the way they smell faintly like Sam past the warm, clean scent of laundry detergent. Whatever the case, it’s a guilty pleasure that Dean never really learns to let go of, even well into adulthood when he’s sure he should be past stealing clothes from his little brother.
If it bothers Sam, he never says anything about it. Mostly, when he catches Dean bundled up in one of his sweaters, he just smiles, something fond in his expression.
“Maybe we can have chicken soup tonight,” Sam muses on one such occasion, finding Dean curled up on the couch with a lapful of blankets and wearing one of Sam’s older hoodies. It’s from his time at Stanford, and it’d even been big on Sam when he wore it back then. “Looks like you could use it.”
Dean just hums, sniffling back his stuffed nose and making room for Sam when he sits down on the other end of the couch. “Yeah. Maybe.”
Sometimes, it’s nice to just settle down like this and let himself feel safe for a while. Sam’s gotten good at recognizing when Dean has these moments, and never seems opposed to indulging him a little bit.
52/365
one soul;
buried in two bodies
#fuck #this post made me think #literally one soul #shared by the two of them #and dean watches someone brutally murder sam #and he can’t do anything about #and because they’re sharing a soul he starts slipping away as soon as sam passes out #and he lies there half conscious #and sam’s bleeding out #and he’s thinking he’ll come back and murder the son of a bitch who dared to do this to them #to sam #and at the same time he’s so so so grateful #he’s blissed out #it’s over#sam’s dead and he can’t feel pain anymore #he’s finally at peace #and dean gets to go with him #and look how serene he looks #almost like falling sleep #but better #because once he’s dead sam will be in his dreams too #sam will be everywhere #dean will never lose him again #one soul #two bodies [via]
A tense hour across the library over the many stupid, cyclical fights they have, and Sam’s had just about enough. He slams his laptop closed and leans across the table, right into Dean’s face.
It says a lot about their boundary issues that Dean doesn’t back away, just kind of crosses his eyes and scowls. “The fuck?”
“Gimme a kiss,” Sam demands, ignoring the flush blooming across his face, the sweat against his palms making his grip against the lip of the table slippery. Never mind in all these years they’ve never once kissed, but Sam knows Dean won’t deny him anything, and he thinks this, this thing they’ve never talked about, this line they’ve never crossed, could be the solution to every fight they have here on out.
“What?” Dean demands. “You been reading some, what is it, slash stuff over there?” But it’s not a no, not that Sam ever expected one.
“Gimme a kiss,” he says again, stonily, tone booking no argument, no give.
All thirty-something years of want flitter across Dean’s face, then, in the best book Sam’s ever read, best movie he’s ever watched. “Sam,” he breathes, no trace of anger left. “Sammy,” he says again, so quietly, like he’s tasting the words instead of saying them.
“Gimme a kiss,” Sam whispers, one more time, three times the charm, wanting it now more than he did the first time he thought about it, twenty years ago.
Dean leans forward, kissing him soundly, seeming to liquify his mouth against Sam’s, so soft, like a whimper, like a question he’s already got the answer to.
Sam pulls back, eyes closed, the smile on his swollen mouth everything he doesn’t know how to say.
“Fuckin’ demanding,” Dean mumbles, pink, looking back down at his research, but his puffy lips are smiling, too.
Valentines 2018 ficlets: #2: Sam/Rowena (requested by @stargazingbros )
“I could teach you,” she says, and he says, “No thanks.”
She looks at him appraisingly, eyes narrowing over the rim of her teacup. “You do magic all the time, you know. Already.”
“I know,” says Sam. It’s true. Even the devils’ traps are magic of a sort.
“So then,” she says, with a purr at the edge of her voice. “What’s a little skills development, between friends?”
“We’re not friends,” Sam reminds her. They’re not. He just needs to keep an eye on her, lately, to make sure that she doesn’t turn bad. He told Dean he’d take her out if he had to. He will. (Dean’s out. It’s Valentine’s Day. He’ll be out all night. So that makes it easier for Sam to be here, now, in a Massachusetts teashop with a red-headed witch.)
“Och,” she says. “Samuel. You can’t pretend we’re not allies, not now.” She puts her hand on his where it’s resting on the table; hers pale and tiny against him, sharp-clawed. She looks up at him, and a light flickers lilac at the back of her eyes. “I could help you, Sam.”
Sam doesn’t want to know.
“Don’t pretend you don’t long for it,” Rowena says. “Real power. Power that you could do something with. Think about him, Sam, about Lucifer, how he made you feel. Wouldn’t you like to know that you could cause him pain?” As she speaks, her composure wavers and her lip curls in a grimace that’s almost alien. Something squeezes in Sam’s chest.
Rowena clasps her fingers tight around his wrist and looks up at him, cat-eyes gleaming. “You’ve got something in you, Sam Winchester. I can feel it. You could do something wonderful.” She leans in closer. “We could do wonderful things together.”
There is very little that Sam would like more than the knowledge that he could inflict damage on Lucifer; real damage, painful, searing, irreversible damage, the kind that fucks somebody up in a way that they can’t be unfucked from. He’s dreamt about it again and again over the last few years, spent nights floating in a sweet relief that evaporates on waking, leaving him heavy with the knowledge of his own utter vulnerability. What Rowena’s offering… it’s worth a lot. But Sam’s not an idiot. Hasn’t he been here before? A woman. A secret. The promise of power.
And yet. And yet.
It’s hot in the tearoom, and damp from the rain outside. The air clings to Sam’s face like wet cotton wool. It’s hard to breathe through it.
“Defensive spells only,” he says.
Rowena smiles. She traces a red fingernail over the white skin of his wrist, the blue vein underneath it. “Oh, yes,” she says.
Episode tag to 11.17, Red Meat
Written on the fly and posted without being proofed or beta’d. The muse struck and I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth. Comments and concrit gratefully received.
“What took you so
long?”The words slip out of
Dean’s mouth unthinkingly, a natural reversion to the sarcasm that he usually
relies on. He and Sam stare at each other across the space between them, and
Dean has just enough time to be awed by how his little brother is barely able
to stand yet his gun hand is rock steady before Sam is crashing hard to the
floor, the gun skittering out his hand.He can see that Sam is
in agony from his rounded shoulders, his head hanging and his hair falling in a
curtain around his face. Dean’s moving before he even realises it, lunging for
his brother and pulling him into his arms just like Sam did for him after their
run in with the soul eater. He feels the moment when Sam lets go, trusting that
his big brother will take care of things now.And he feels it a
moment later when Sam loses his grip on consciousness.Dean bellows for help,
and doors start opening cautiously and people who had been hiding from the
chaos start slipping out. He lays Sam down carefully, and pulls open his jacket
and shirt, nearly gagging at the sheer amount of blood. How his brother made it
from the cabin all the way back to the clinic is beyond him. He’s always known
that Sam is the stronger of the two of them, but he is truly dumbfounded by
this.Hands start pushing
him out of the way and he has to fight down the urge to strike back, knowing
that it’s the doctors and nurses who can save his brother’s life, but it’s a
close thing. A gurney is rolled up and it takes several of them to lift Sam
onto it, and then they’re gone, disappearing behind the swinging doors at the
end of the hall.He looks down the hall
at Michelle, and their eyes meet. She’s still cowering on the floor where she
fell when her husband tried to reason with her, and she doesn’t look like she’s planning on moving anytime soon. Dean goes to her and reaches down a hand. Michelle looks
at it before taking it, and he helps her stand. She falls into him and he wraps
his arms around her.Dean figures they both
need it right about now.
Sam rescues a kitten
This ended up being the best prompt ever, I didn’t know I needed Sam and a kitten until now.
Sam keeps the cat food on the top shelf with his trail mixes and granola, one place in the kitchen he’s sure Dean won’t look. The litter tray is hidden under the desk in his bedroom, along with a velvety purple mouse and bright green ball for playing.
He rolls the ball across his bedroom floor and watches Kitten scamper after it, almost skidding into the brick wall in his enthusiasm. The cat digs his tiny claws into the ball once he catches it, kicking it with his back feet.
Kitten – Sam hasn’t come up with a more suitable name yet – is small enough to fit in both of his palms, he’s almost completely black with bright amber eyes and the tiniest tuft of white fur on his nose. Sam found him in an abandoned house where he and Dean took care of a poltergeist. The house ended up burning down, almost taking Kitten with it, but Sam stuffed the ragged little stray under his jacket and brought him home.
It’s been a couple of weeks since then and Kitten has filled out a little, and his once matted fur has been trimmed and brushed. Half his tail is missing, but that doesn’t seem to deter the tiny cat. He comes trotted over to where Sam sits on the other side of the room, promptly rubbing himself against Sam’s leg, purring deeply.
Sam’s never been much of a cat person, was obsessed with dogs as a kid. He’d intended to take Kitten to a shelter, but after one night with the cat in his room, after waking up in a cold sweat from a nightmare, Kitten had nuzzled in close and helped him back to sleep again.
And that was that.
“Sammy?” Dean calls from the hallway.
Sam quickly scoops Kitten up and plops him onto his bed, then slips out into the hallway, firmly closing the door behind him. Dean, red eyed and sniffling, frowns at him.
“What’s up with you?” he asks. “You barely come out of your room. You better have a girl in there or else I’m gonna have to worry.”
“Dean – “
“Or a guy, you know, I don’t judge.”
Sam rolls his eyes. “I’m just getting some work done. Catching up on sleep.”
Dean pins him with his gaze for a moment longer before he has to sneeze, three times in a row. He wipes his nose with his sleeve, face scrunching up. “Man, I think I’m allergic to our detergent or something,” he says, then disappears down the hall.
Sam slips back into his room and Kitten is quick to greet him by rubbing his face on Sam’s leg. Sam picks him up and lets him climb up onto his shoulder, scratching gently at Kitten’s chin.
“I knew it,” Dean’s voice comes from the doorway. Sam hadn’t even heard him come in. “I knew you were hiding something. A freaking cat, Sam?”
“I can explain,” Sam answers quickly, detaching the cat from his shoulder. He holds him close to his chest, suddenly terrified that Kitten will be gone tomorrow. “Look, I’m sorry I didn’t say anything, but I knew you’d freak out. He didn’t have anywhere else to go, Dean.”
Dean looks ready to protest but one look at Sam’s pleading face shuts him up. He sighs, then sneezes. “Fine, but you keep that thing away from me. And I’m not paying for its kibble or whatever.”
“Already done,” Sam promises.
Dean’s about to leave, but he pauses. “What’s it called?”
“I just call him Kitten for now.”
“Jesus, Samantha, at least give him a cool name like Zeppelin or – I don’t know – Chainsaw,” he says, then he’s gone, sneezing his way down the hallway.
Backup bloh 