Chapter Text
Everything starts to fall apart in Philadelphia. They’re walking down the street discussing their latest case—something has been killing pregnant teens and slurping the unborn fetuses from their bodies, and so far they’ve both come up with bupkis—when someone calls, “Sam!”
Sam pauses and turns around. Dean keeps going for a few more steps and then stops himself.
There are two men coming toward them, and Sam only has to take one look to know that he wasn’t the one they were calling. The guy on the right is wearing a tight, pink t-shirt and a white scarf around his neck. The other is wearing a grey t-shirt with a rainbow shooting from the left shoulder down to the right hip.
Dean has gone very, very still.
“Oh man, it is him!” the man in the pink shirt—kid, really: neither of them looks a day over twenty—exclaims. “I mean. It’s you! Wow. This is, like, such an honor, Mr. Stallion.”
It’s so horrifying that Sam wants to laugh.
“You’ve got the wrong guy,” Dean says, and when Sam glances at his brother, the back of Dean’s neck and the tips of his ears have gone an alarming shade of red.
“No, I’m sure it’s you. I’d recognize those lips anywhere.”
Dean’s posture is stiffer than Sam has ever seen it, and Sam is torn between the urge to touch his brother’s shoulder in an effort to reassure him and the knowledge that the best thing he could probably do right now is to walk away so that Dean can maintain an air of plausible deniability. Instead, he stands frozen in the middle of the sidewalk like the asshole he is.
Pink’s friend—his boyfriend, maybe—senses that this is maybe not the best time or place and reaches out to take Pink’s arm. “Sorry, he’s on a sugar rush,” he tries. “We’ll just—”
“I’ve watched Pussycat Fever, like, a zillion times,” Pink gushes, brightly oblivious. “It’s seriously the best movie in the entire Hunters oeuvre! And you—man, you were fantastic! I can’t believe you managed to take both Aaron Rockhard and Harry the Hammer at once! That’s hardcore, man. Oh, hey! Can I get your autograph?”
Dean continues to stare at Pink blankly and, after almost a minute of strained silence, Pink takes a shuffling step back. Looks like he finally woke up and smelled the awkward. Then the kid’s gaze slips over to Sam and he brightens again.
“Hey, is this your boyfriend?” he asks, Then, to Sam, he says, “You’re really lucky, man.”
Oh God, Sam’s gonna laugh. Or possibly puke.
“C’mon, Russ, I think you’ve got the wrong guy,” Rainbow Shirt says.
Pink blinks and then shakes his head. “No. No way, man.”
Rainbow Shirt nudges his (boy)friend’s shoulder and says, “He’s too tall. Also, this dude’s got freckles. The Stallion’s skin was flawless, remember?”
“Oh,” Pink says, face falling. In a last ditch attempt, he offers, “Make up?”
Rainbow Shirt shakes his head. “Honey, you need to snap out of the fantasy and live in the real world for a moment. Also, you need to apologize to the nice men for the mix up.”
Pink doesn’t seem to be the brightest crayon in the box, but he’s finally—thank God—catching on, and now he nods, eyes flickering back and forth between Dean and Sam. “Um. Right. Sorry. My mistake.”
“We’re really sorry,” Rainbow Shirt echoes, and then he’s dragging Pink away and leaving Sam in the middle of the street with an effectively outed Dean in the city of brotherly love.
Sam’s heart is beating rapidly enough that he’s a little concerned it’ll pop out of his chest. After all these months—after years of wanting to talk about it—this is his chance. He doesn’t have to admit he’s seen the movie. He just needs to nag his brother about this encounter until Dean breaks down and tells him.
And then what? he asks himself.
When the first answer his brain sends back is ‘then you can find out whether he’s up for a repeat performance’, Sam knows he isn’t ready. He isn’t strong enough to drudge all of this up without his own feelings coating everything like radioactive glitter.
“So,” he says finally. “Guess you’ve got a doppelganger.”
Dean looks at him for a moment—his eyes hidden behind his sunglasses, his mouth unsmiling and still—and then he nods. “Yeah, guess so.”
Dean doesn’t usually drink in the middle of cases—not heavily, anyway—but as Sam sits at the bar that night, going over their notes, Dean knocks back shot after shot until he’s pliant with drink: eyes heavy-lidded and mouth lax. He rubs at the scar on his forehead with manic frequency, like if he does it hard enough and long enough he can erase it. Meanwhile, his left hand plays with the empty shot glasses that he won’t let their waitress clear. He lines them up and shifts them around the table like soldiers on a battlefield, fighting a war against some imaginary enemy in his mind.
Sam can’t be sure, but he thinks Dean’s shot glass soldiers are losing.
Tightening his grip on his notebook, he bumps his brother’s knee with his own under the table and asks, “You ready to head out?”
Dean blinks up at him, fingers stilling on his forehead. He looks almost drugged and more vulnerable than he would probably like, and Sam’s mind helpfully reminds him that this isn’t too far from how his brother looked when he was freshly fucked and dripping come. He shoves the thought away immediately and busies himself with packing up. His heart is beating too quickly: mouth bitter with mingled guilt and want. At the jangle of metal sliding across wood, he lets himself look up again.
“Think y’should drive,” Dean slurs, taking his hand back and leaving the keys where they are.
“Sure,” Sam agrees. “Do you think you can make it out to the car at least?”
It’s just a question—not meant as rebuke or scorn or disdain—but Dean’s brow furrows and he pushes away from the table with something approaching violence. “Can handle m’own liquor,” he spits, staggering toward the door. Sam swears under his breath, gathering the rest of his stuff in a hurry and jogging after his brother. He finds Dean trying to pick himself up from the bottom of the front steps and, catching his elbow, hauls him up.
“’M fine,” Dean insists, anger heavy in his voice, but he’s too drunk to figure out how to dislodge Sam’s hand. Sam runs his eyes over his brother’s body quickly—no obvious signs that he hurt himself when he fell over—and then sighs.
“Come on, Dean. Let’s get you back to the motel.”
“Don’t need your help,” Dean growls. “Can take care of myself.”
“I know you can. Just humor me, okay?”
“Don’t need,” Dean mutters to himself as Sam draws him toward the car, “Don’t need anybody. Fuck it.”
Sam leans his brother up against the side of the Impala while he gets the door open, and when he turns around, Dean has his head tilted back and is staring up at the sky. The moonlight flows over him with a gentle glow, softening his edges and making the outline of his lips shine. The scar on his temple is so white it looks silver, and Dean is beautiful, so very beautiful. Sam reaches without thinking, fingers brushing the exposed line of his brother’s throat, and Dean startles, jerking away and almost falling. He catches himself on the car and blinks at Sam, expression hovering between uncertain and angry.
“Did you just—”
“No,” Sam says, way too quickly to be believed, and curls his traitorous fingers into a fist.
Luckily, Dean’s alcohol-soused brain has already moved on from the brief caress, and instead of pursuing it he rolls forward and rests his forehead against the roof of the car. “M so fuckin drunk,” he mumbles.
“Car, Dean,” Sam tells him, taking him by the arm and drawing him toward the open door.
“Car, Sam,” Dean mocks. “Coat, Sam. Door, Sam. Seat, Sam. Dashboard, Sam. Hair, Sam. Window, Sam.”
“Dean, I swear to god, if you don’t shut up I will tape your mouth shut,” Sam mutters, fighting to get his brother’s seatbelt closed while doing his best to ignore the way that Dean is slumped forward against his side and back.
“Go ahead,” Dean answers immediately, voice thick with self-loathing. “Cover up my fuckin mouth. Fuckin—fuckin lips.”
Sam’s sweating suddenly, and his hands tremble on the buckle. Dean rests his head on Sam’s shoulder. His laugh huffs out warm and wet against Sam’s neck and hair.
“S’what they all want. S’what they. Fuckin’ cocksucker lips. Wanna fuck my mouth like’m some kinda fuckin’ girl.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not a girl, Dean,” Sam says. It’s lame and awkward and in no way an adequate response, but between Dean’s wet breath panting out across the nape of his neck, and Dean going on about his mouth like that, and Sam remembering what Dean’s mouth looked like filled with cock, Sam is lucky he’s capable of coherent speech at all.
Then Dean asks, “You think I’d be—be good at it, Sammy?”
Jesus Christ.
He pats drunkenly at Sam’s head. “You ever think maybe I’d be—be a natural, some shit like that? Think I could open my mouth, let some guy stuff his fat cock down my throat? Think I could milk his dick with my cocksucking lips?”
Okay, that’s it.
Dropping the belt buckle—he’s just gonna have to be careful not to crash—Sam straightens quickly enough that he knocks his brother’s head back against the side of the door.
“Ow!” Dean complains, rubbing his jaw.
“Sorry,” Sam says insincerely as he closes the door and hurries around to the driver’s side.
Luckily for him, Dean is either sulking or sunk into his thoughts on the drive back to the motel: he’s not saying anything, let alone asking Sam to think about his pretty, obscene mouth stuffed with cock. Dean stays silent as Sam parks, and as Sam hauls him out of the car, and as Sam manhandles him inside and into the bed. He lets Sam strip off his boots and then rolls onto his side and stares at the wall.
Running a hand through his hair, Sam starts for the bathroom only to be stopped by the sound of his brother’s voice.
“Why’re you here?”
Slowly, Sam turns around. Dean’s still watching the wall: back to him. “Because this is our motel room?” he tries.
“No,” Dean says, struggling to roll over so that he can peer up at Sam. “Why’re you here?”
Sam looks back at his brother’s face, which is painfully, miserably open with all the alcohol Dean has consumed, and is too stunned by the stupidity of that question to come up with an answer. Before his mind has even begun functioning again, his brother shuts his eyes and sinks back against the pillow.
“’S what I thought.”
Sam doesn’t know what answer Dean read in his silence, but it can’t have been anything good. If Sam were a stronger man—if he were less afraid of his own emotions, and of Dean’s reaction to them—then this is when he would have said, “I’m here because I need you. Because you’re my brother and I love you and I’m never going to stop needing you.”
But all he can manage is, “It’s not like that, Dean.”
“Whatever,” Dean mutters, disbelieving, and he’s out before Sam can say another word.
In the morning, Sam wants to bring it up again—fix things—but Dean is hung over and pissed off about it, and it’s safer to keep his mouth shut. He wants to talk later that afternoon, too; only by then they’ve figured out that they’re hunting an Aswang, and all Dean wants to do is bitch about the complete and utter lack of a Supernatural Customs Bureau to keep shit like this from getting into the country in the first place. Then they have to locate a silver weapon big enough to kill the thing, steal said weapon—a huge, ceremonial sword—from a local collector’s house, track the Aswang down, and dispatch it.
For his part, Dean seems to have no memory of the night before. Sometimes, though, Sam catches his brother looking at him with this odd, still expression that makes his chest ache. Lying in bed at night with Dean’s steady breathing the only noise in the room, he tries to figure out what it is about that look that bothers him so much. He thinks it might be something about the tension lines around Dean’s mouth, or maybe the clouded, forest green of his eyes.
Something is going on inside his brother’s head, that’s for sure. Sam just has no idea what.
He doesn’t find out until two weeks later, and then he’s lying bound on the floor of Becky’s family room with something that looks like his brother but really, really isn’t, standing over him.
“You know, this is some really pretty packaging,” the shifter says.
It's examining itself—examining Dean—in the mirror hanging on the wall. Tilting Dean's face from side to side and chewing on Dean's pouty bottom lip. As Sam watches, it gives the scar on Dean's temple a single, lingering prod before dropping its hand and turning around to grin at him.
“Too bad he’s too fucked in the head to put it to good use, huh?”
Sam twists his hands against the ropes binding him—useless: for all intents and purposes, these are Dean’s knots—and says, “Don’t talk about him like that.” He knows that he’s only playing into the thing’s hands by responding, but he can’t help himself: can’t bring himself to lie quietly while this son of a bitch insults his brother.
“Just making conversation,” it tells him and then, with an amused smirk, reaches down to cup its crotch.
Sam shifts his eyes away, disgusted by the heat that fills his own groin at the sight. He feels dirty and uncomfortable: Dean isn’t here to see what the shifter is doing to his body (and it isn’t even Dean’s body anyway, it’s just a replica, a copy) but Sam knows how his brother would feel if he were here. Knows that Dean would be shamed and violated and really fucking pissed off. Sam wishes, violently, that he were free and had a silver-coated knife he could use to pin the damned thing to the wall.
The shifter lets out a low groan that doesn’t do anything for Sam’s peace of mind—it’s the same hoarse, reluctant noise Dean was making in the movie—and then breathes, “Oh yeah. Real pretty packaging.” Its voice is taunting. Baiting him.
Sam clenches his jaw and says nothing.
“Goddamned crime, actually,” the shifter continues. “You got a body like this, you enjoy it. Dean? Dean’s too busy hating himself. I’m surprised he can even get it up without a little pharmaceutical help, if you know what I mean.”
Sam’s gut twists and this time he can’t help himself. “You don’t know shit about him,” he spits, turning his head around to glare at the shifter.
It’s still massaging its crotch, but at his words it laughs and drops its hand. “You know, you’re awfully sensitive about your brother’s sex life.”
Strolling closer, the shifter nudges Sam’s side with one foot and he strikes clumsily at its leg with his bound hands. He connects solidly a couple of times before it drops to a crouch, putting one knee on the carpet, and catches his flailing hands.
Sam fights, but the thing is incredibly strong, and he’s still a little woozy from being knocked out before. A moment later its other knee is trapping his bound arms against his stomach.
“I’m gonna slice you up from the outside in,” the shifter promises. Now that it doesn’t need its hand to hold Sam’s arms still, it reaches up to grip his hair instead, yanking his head back and baring his throat. “But I’m wondering if you wouldn’t like a little taste of something else first.”
Its eyes flicker—Dean’s green irises obscured with something slick and pale and iridescent—and Sam feels something fumbling across his thoughts. He thinks he can smell, faintly, the reek of the shifter’s discarded skins from the sewers. Above him, the shifter’s face has collapsed in something riding the fine line between pain and agony. It jerks its head to the side, a quick spasm, and lets out a hiss. Then the invasive sensation of having the layers of his mind peeled back and examined fades and the tension in the shifter’s face eases. A moment later it’s laughing: wide and genuine, like Dean hardly ever does.
“Oh, that’s priceless! You actually saw it? That’s probably big brother’s worst nightmare, you know. The worst one he remembers, anyway. And you actually got off on it. You got off on watching big brother take it up the ass for money.”
The sensation of having his mind felt up may be gone, but Sam’s insides are still crawling with it, and the guilt added by the shifter’s words makes the nausea nearly unbearable. There’s a difference between knowing, objectively, how betrayed Dean will feel if he ever finds out that Sam watched the movie and hearing it as a fact from something with a direct pipeline to his brother’s brain. Sam flounders for a moment, trying to deal with the alternating waves of guilt and disgust running through him, and then shoves them aside instead. There are times to deal with how fucked up he is, but tied up and at the mercy of a psychopathic serial killer isn’t one of them.
Gritting his teeth, he spits out, “Fuck you.”
“I may have to rethink this whole killing you thing,” the shifter muses, releasing his hair. “Might be more fun to slip into something a little younger—” It trails its hand suggestively down his chest. “—and pay Dean a visit.”
Sam’s breathing speeds at the suggestion. “You touch him and I’ll kill you,” he says, trying to put all of his determination into his voice.
The shifter smirks at him, unfazed. “Oh, I won’t have to touch him. All I have to do is give him the answer he’s waiting for. All I have to do is tell him why a smart, college boy like you is hanging around someone as pathetic as him.” Licking its lips, it leans closer. “All I have to do is tell him that baby brother’s only along for the ride because he wants ‘kitty’ to get down on his knees and wrap those pretty, cocksucking lips around his cock—”
“Shut up!”
“—or would you rather have his ass?” Its smile goes sharp. “I never broke someone without cutting into them before. I wonder if he’ll cry as pretty as the others did when I tell him that he’s nothing more than a tight ass and a hot pair of lips to you.”
“If you can read my mind, then you know it isn’t like that,” Sam says. He doesn’t know if he’s furious or panicked, but he feels flushed all over—nauseous. He twists his hands futilely beneath the shifter’s knee.
“Oh? So all those filthy, dirty thoughts aren’t yours? You don’t daydream about opening up that mouth of his and pushing your cock inside? You don’t want to bend him over and fuck him: see if being stuffed full of his baby brother’s cock can get him off as hard as taking two strangers?”
Sam’s stomach gives a violent twist. He can’t deny that he’s thought of it. He’s wondered whether he could fuck Dean as raw and red as those porn stars did: if he could drag those same, broken, toofulltoomuch noises from his brother’s throat. He’s watched Dean stuff burgers into his mouth and imagined his cock stretching those lips instead, the tight channel of Dean’s throat around him.
But that isn’t the whole story. It isn’t even half of it.
Because he also watches Dean sleeping in the morning when he wakes up first, and he laughs at his cheesy jokes, and the childlike joy on his brother’s face (over the simplest things, like finding cherry pie in a diner or a classic horror movie on TV) brings an answering glow in his own chest. Sam may want to fuck his brother, but he also wants to hold him, and make him smile, and chase away the shadows from his eyes. He wants to make Dean see himself the way that Sam sees him: the way that anyone who takes the time to push past Dean’s masks would see him. He wants to teach Dean to give a damn about himself.
“I love him,” Sam growls. “Not that I’d expect a psychopathic murderer like you to understand what that means.”
“Oh, but I do know what that means, Sammy,” the shifter responds, and Sam can tell from the softness in its voice that it has gone back to playing Dean instead of just talking about him. “Love’s what other people give you as long as you give them what they want. Love is what you get until people wise up enough to take a good look at you and realize what a complete waste of time you are.”
Sam’s gut aches with the knowledge that it’s pulling the words from his brother’s head. This isn’t the shifter messing with his mind: it’s true, Dean actually feels like that. As tears burn his eyes, he starts struggling again in an effort to dislodge the thing’s knee. It rides the attempt easily, chucking as it lets Dean’s personality fall away.
“You’re special, though, aren’t you, Sam? You get underneath his skin: you nestle right up close inside his ribcage. Dean doesn’t want you there—it fucking petrifies him—but he doesn’t know how to shut you out and he’s been starting to hope that you might be different. He’s starting to hope that there’s another definition for love: something he can have. Something that stays.”
Its grin widens.
“Imagine how he’s gonna feel when he finds out you just want the same thing as everyone else.”
“No!” Sam shouts. His struggles redouble again, and the shifter rocks back a little before dropping forward and driving the breath from his chest. It wraps its fingers around his neck—delicately, one at a time—and then tightens its grip, cutting off Sam’s air.
“I’m really hoping he’ll be broken enough when I’m done with him to give me a ride,” it says as it chokes him. “Be nice to take this pretty package out for a spin.”
“Ngh!” Sam grunts in protest, struggling to get his hands out from beneath the shifter’s weight so that he can at least try to fight.
“Don’t worry, he should be used to spreading and taking it by now. He just needs a little reminding.” It chuckles, beaming down at Sam as his vision starts to grey. “Dean and I are gonna take a little walk down memory lane. Gonna take a look in the mirror, so to speak.” Sam can’t really see anymore, but he can still feel as the shifter leans close, breath moist on his ear. “You don’t mind sloppy fifths, right?”
“Hey, asshole!”
The pressure on Sam’s throat loosens immediately. Before he can take his first gasp of air, though, the shifter digs its knee into his stomach as it pushes itself to his feet. Sam coughs, gags, and then finally gets a sliver of air as he rolls onto his side and curls in on himself, hands cradling his aching gut. Beneath the roar of the blood rushing through his head, the gunshots that come a moment later sound distant and soft: like corks popping. Then Dean is there, hands moving rapidly over Sam’s chest and brushing his neck and cheeks.
“Sammy! Sammy, stay with me, okay? Deep breaths. Come on, man, you can do it. Just breathe.”
“Dean,” Sam gasps, relieved, and Dean hauls him up against his chest. Despite the continuing, deep-seated ache in his stomach, Sam lifts his bound hands and hooks his fingers in his brother’s shirt. “Dean,” he says again.
One of Dean’s arms goes around Sam’s shoulders. His other hand buries itself in Sam’s hair, stroking. “Right here, man. I gotcha, Sammy. I gotcha.”
Sam turns his face into his brother’s chest and breathes in deeply—scent of gunpowder and sweat—and then lets the encroaching darkness have him.
After St. Louis, Dean handles Sam like he’s made of glass, and gives him sad, concerned looks when he thinks that Sam isn’t looking. It’s grating—it was grating by the end of the first hour—but Sam doesn’t have the heart to call his brother on it. The hunt shook Dean more than it should have, and Sam can’t figure out why. He doesn’t understand why Dean has changed the rules on him and keeps going on about Stanford, and law school, and California. It’s almost like Dean wants him to leave, but every time Sam tries to talk to him about it, Dean shuts down on him. He touches the scar on his forehead more than he used to, as well, which is troubling for reasons Sam can’t define.
Even worse, though, is Sam’s newfound, leaden understanding that he can never tell Dean how he feels. He hadn’t been aware that he was actually considering it until the shifter gave him a peek into his brother’s mind and took the possibility away from him. Now the loss has left him hurting fierce and deep, like he has a sprung rib in his chest. It hurts because the shifter was right: Sam can speak as eloquently as he wants about his heart and how much he needs and loves his brother, but Dean is only going to hear yet another person putting limits and requirements on their love for him.
Sam isn’t sure that his brother would be wrong, either.
After all, he already has Dean’s fixed and unswerving attention. He goes to sleep in the same room with his brother, and eats every meal with Dean, and goes out to bars with him when they’re bored or need to blow off some steam. Dean rests his hand on the small of Sam’s back when he’s overly nervous or depressed, and he brings Sam cool, wet cloths to drape over his forehead in the wake of nightmares that leave him sweating and achy. The only thing missing from their relationship is sex, actually, which means that the only motivation Sam has to tell Dean how he feels is the hope of physical compensation.
Which would make him guilty of everything the shifter accused.
Sam understands that; he does, but it doesn’t stop him from hurting. It doesn’t stop the secret he’s carrying around from lodging just underneath his ribcage: hot and pulsing like an open sore. It doesn’t stop him from longing for the right to put his arms around his brother and kiss those maddening, perfect lips until he gets it through Dean’s thick skull that Sam loves him and is never going to leave.
But Dean is damaged enough already, and Sam isn’t going to be the one who finishes breaking his brother, and so he keeps his mouth shut.
Dean loads their crap into the Impala, slips behind the wheel while Sam climbs in on the other side, and they drive.