Chapter Text
Sam finds Dad standing outside in the middle of the salvage yard. There’s snow piled thick on the ground, and Dad isn’t wearing a coat—shoes either, Sam’s pretty sure. He doesn’t have his cane, which Sam knows he needs for anything more than a few, slow steps. He’s still holding the glasses and the Scotch.
Sam shivers as he hurries down the steps to join the man, not pausing to grab a coat or boots himself. His feet burn where he steps on the snow, packed down from traffic in and out of the house—Bobby and Dad, since neither he nor Dean has been outside since they got here—but he’s too panicked and nauseous to notice.
“Dad,” he says as he approaches. “Hey, come back inside. You’re gonna catch cold.” He reaches for his father’s arm and Dad turns before he can actually connect.
Sam guesses he should expect the punch, but it still catches him by surprise. The blow knocks him down and back, sprawling him on the snow, which gets down the back of his pants and burns where his bare skin touches it. He flinches up into a sitting position, swearing, but doesn’t dare get up with Dad standing over him. His jaw and lower lip feel hot and throbbing, and he can taste blood where he bit his tongue when Dad’s punch snapped his teeth together.
At least the man dropped the Scotch before hitting him.
“I trusted you,” Dad says, and Sam felt like shit before, but he feels even worse now. Because Dad doesn’t sound angry. He doesn’t even sound all that surprised. He just sounds sad.
“I know,” Sam breathes. “I know, I promised and I—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been going behind your back like that.”
Dad stares at him, still expressionless, and says, “That’s it, isn’t it? That’s all you think you have to apologize for. You think I’m upset you lied to me.”
Sam frowns slightly, perplexed in the midst of his fear. He doesn’t know what his father is getting at, although he can tell that there’s something there. Something he’s supposed to be understanding and isn’t.
“Are you fucking him?” Dad asks bluntly. “Have you been fucking him?”
“I—no, never. We haven’t. He’s not ready.”
“So you can still see that well, at least,” Dad says, voice soft and tired, and then glances down at his left hand, at the glasses. From there, his eyes drift further down to the bottle, lying on its side in the snow. With a grimace, he leans down and gets his hand back on it, picks it up.
“Get up and come inside,” he says. He isn’t looking at Sam, eyes fixed instead on the back door of the house as he starts to make his slow, painful way toward it.
Now that he has permission, Sam picks himself up in a hurry, brushing his hands uselessly against his stinging skin, and moves toward his father. “You want to lean on me?”
For a moment, he thinks that Dad’s going to refuse out of spite or disgust, but the man accepts the offered arm wordlessly, even though he still won’t look at Sam. Together, they make their way back up onto the porch—Sam was right: Dad’s as barefoot as he is—and inside the house. Dad waves a hand at the kitchen table once they’re in and Sam, taking the motion for the command it is, leads him over to a chair and helps him sit down.
As Sam hurries back to shut the door and lock it, he hears the clink of glasses from behind him—Dad setting everything down on the table. He turns back to find his father uncapping the Scotch and tipping it out into two glasses. The third—Dean’s—sits there unused and empty.
Sam is quiet as sits down across from his father, where Dad has pushed the glass undoubtedly meant for him. He’s finally starting to shiver—delayed reaction from the cold outside—and he tips back the alcohol gratefully while Dad empties his own glass and refills it again. When he sees Sam has finished his first as well, Dad slides the bottle across the table and then waits, sitting there with both hands wrapped around his drink.
They sit in silence for several minutes, while Sam’s initial panic quiets into a more resigned, guilty shame and his jaw throbs, and then Dad says, “I’m leaving.”
Sam jerks. Of all the things he expected to hear from his father, that was absolutely last on the list. “What? You’re—where? Why? Because Dean and I—”
“I can’t stay here, Sam,” Dad interrupts. “You. What you’re doing to Dean is part of it, but I can’t. I’m sorry, but I’m not a strong man.”
If anything, that hits Sam even harder than Dad’s initial announcement, and his breath huffs out. He feels like Dad just punched him again: lower this time, sinking a direct hit into Sam’s gut. But as Sam watches, tears leak from his father’s eyes and run down into his beard. He’s staring at his glass, not meeting Sam’s gaze, and the tears make Sam’s stomach flop uneasily.
He isn’t supposed to be seeing this. Dad isn’t supposed to be saying these things. He’s supposed to be fighting with Sam, trying to hurt him. He’s supposed to be furious.
Instead, Dad wipes ineffectually at the tears with one hand and says, “I can’t watch my boy like this anymore, Sam. I tried, but I can’t.”
“He’s getting better,” Sam protests, but Dad laughs sourly and shakes his head.
“He’s wasting away. You think I haven’t noticed? How little he eats? You think I don't notice my boy shrinking in front of my eyes?” He looks up then, eyes red and wet, and traps Sam with his gaze. “You think I haven’t noticed him flinch away when I get too close?”
Sam flinches himself at that, because Dean ... Dean’s maybe not as good with Dad and Bobby as he could be, but he has been getting better with them. And if Dean flinches around Dad, then it isn’t—it isn’t because he still thinks Dad’s going to hurt him. He just gets confused sometimes.
“He’s getting better,” Sam repeats. “I know maybe it’s hard to see, but he—with me, he’s.” He hesitates, because Dad doesn’t like that aspect of their relationship, and then forces the words out anyway. “He’s getting better with me. Dad, he. I’m sorry you had to see that upstairs, but you should be relieved! I mean, that was a huge step for him.”
“Relieved,” Dad repeats, rolling the word around in his mouth. “I should be relieved that my sons are fucking? That my youngest boy is—is abusing his brother?”
The barb hits just as Dad intended it to and Sam draws himself up a little, angry. “Dean came to me, Dad. I never would have touched him unless he had.”
Dad meets his gaze, and Sam sees a faint, reflected flare of anger in his father’s eyes. “Dean’s not in any kind of state to be making that kind of decision right now, and you know that as well as I do. Or you would if you weren’t so far gone.” He shakes his head. “I oughta put you down, Sam. I oughta end you now before you hurt him more.”
Something deep inside of Sam curls in on itself at that proclamation, but he ignores the distant pain in favor of the pulsing anger and challenges, “So why don’t you?”
“I dunno. Maybe I’m an optimist. Maybe I’m just a sentimental fool. I’m not gonna pretend I haven’t thought about it—hell, tried to talk myself into it, even. But I can’t.”
He sounds shamed at the admission, and that more than anything else hits Sam, getting into his throat and choking him to silence.
“But like I said,” Dad continues after a moment. “I can’t watch it happen either.”
Sam forces himself to swallow the lump in his throat at that, blinking back tears that he refuses to let fall, and asks, “When?”
“Now,” Dad answers. “Tonight.”
“Are you even going to bother saying goodbye?”
Dad doesn’t even hesitate before shaking his head. “No. He wouldn’t—Dean doesn’t want to see me right now, Sam. Goodbye isn’t changing that, and it isn’t going to fix anything. Best just to go.”
God help him, Sam can’t do anything but agree with that assessment, especially after what Dad walked in on. Dealing with Dean after Dad’s gone is going to be difficult, but dealing with him after a farewell will be worse. Dean doesn’t do well in everyday conversations with the man: he’s going to be a wreck after something so emotional.
“When will you be back?” Sam asks.
Dad just shakes his head again, wordlessly, and Sam isn’t sure whether to read that as an “I don’t know,” or a “never”. He wouldn’t know how to respond to the latter, so he keeps his mouth shut and doesn’t ask for clarification.
After a beat, Dad shifts himself and says, “I want you to think about leaving too.”
Sam stiffens at that, anger flaring over the jumble of emotions, and says, “I’m not abandoning him.”
Dad flinches from the words, which come out as the accusation Sam intended, but his jaw firms with determination and he says, “You’re hurting him. You’re hurting him in ways I can’t even begin to explain to you. I can’t make you leave, Sam, but I’m begging you. Give him—give him some space to get his head on straight.”
“He needs me,” Sam maintains.
Dad shakes his head, but there’s no anger in it. No disgust. Just weariness. “No, he only thinks he does. And unless you give him a chance to figure out otherwise, he’s going to go on thinking it. If you love him, Sam. If you really, truly love him the way you say, then you’ll give him a chance to be his own man for once. You’ll set him free.”
Sam can’t come up with any response to that: he doesn’t know where to begin—with the man’s presumption that he knows best or his disdain for Dean’s obvious strength. For what Sam and Dean mean to each other, and how rare it is to find that kind of connection. But some of what he’s feeling must show in his eyes, because Dad shakes his head and lets out a heavy breath.
“Had to try,” he mumbles, pushing his glass away. Then, eyes already distant and detached, he asks, “Help an old man pack?”
Sam is itching to get back to Dean, but the thought of having to tell Dean what’s happening while Dad is still in the house isn’t all that appetizing. It doesn’t take long, anyway: Dad doesn’t have much in the way of belongings, and they’re all in the small downstairs room he’s been using. When Sam is done, he tosses on a coat and sticks his feet into a pair of Bobby’s boots and carries the two bags out to his father’s truck.
Dad’s standing there when Sam turns back toward the house, leaning heavily on his cane and bundled up in his oversized winter coat. The keys are dangling in his free hand.
“You say goodbye to Bobby?” Sam asks, already knowing the answer. He’s pretty sure that if Bobby knew what was going on right now, he’d be shouting the house down—or out here slashing holes in Dad’s tires at the very least.
Sure enough, Dad shakes his head. “I’ll call him from the road,” he says, and then limps past Sam and over to the driver’s side door. He pauses there, glancing back over his shoulder, and there’s a boyish part of Sam that perks up hopefully, expecting some kind of hug or at least a handshake.
Instead, Dad says, “Think about what I said,” and gets into the cab. Sam stands there quietly while Dad gets himself situated. He doesn’t raise a hand in farewell as the man finally starts the car and pulls away, but Dad doesn’t look at him again either, so Sam guesses they’re about even.
Dean is waiting for him when he finally gets back to the room. Sam can’t read his brother’s face—mostly because he’s doing his best not to meet Dean’s eyes as he comes inside and shuts the door behind him and strips back down. He isn’t in the mood to go back to what he was doing, but that’s fine because he’s pretty sure Dean isn’t going to ask to pick up where they left off either. But he wants the skin on skin comfort, and he’s worried Dean will read him putting clothes between them as a sign of rejection, so he slides back underneath the covers with his brother still naked.
And immediately gets a lapful of Dean.
“Missed you,” Dean says, wrapping his arms around Sam and kissing his throat. One of his legs comes up, hooking over Sam’s hip and leaving Sam with the broad expanse of his brother’s thigh to rut up against if he wants. As though he caught the stray thought, Dean shifts his leg, rubbing it against Sam encouragingly.
Sam’s insides go cold and his mind stutters to a stop.
“Sam?” Dean says after a moment, pausing in his kisses to look up at him. “You okay?”
Is Sam okay. Nothing about Dad. No questioning the sound of Dad’s truck starting and then fading away, which Dean must have heard.
“Dad left,” Sam says, putting it out there.
“Okay,” Dean agrees. One of his arms unlocks from Sam’s chest and moves down so that he can grip Sam’s limp cock and stroke. Despite his growing unease, Sam feels himself start to harden beneath the attention, and he catches his brother’s hand and returns it to his chest.
“Hey,” he says. “Slow down a sec, okay?”
Dean peers at him, at once so familiar and so opaque, and Sam realizes abruptly that he can’t read his brother’s expression. He doesn’t think he’s been reading Dean’s expressions for a while now, actually: he’s just been taking everything at face value and assuming that Dean would let him know if he was getting anything wrong. Not because he doesn’t care about how Dean is feeling, but just ... he got tired. And he got lazy. And he stopped looking because it was easier to let Dean pretend for them both.
Jesus Christ.
Sam pushes the panic away and makes an effort now, focusing on his brother’s placid, complacent expression as he says, “He isn’t coming back.”
Deep down, so well buried that Sam almost thinks he’s imagining it, there’s a flicker in Dean’s eyes. Sam can’t tell what it means—it could be relief, as far as he knows—and he wonders when he got so out of practice with this. With Dean. Or maybe it’s Dean who has changed. Maybe Dean has finally learned how to shut Sam out.
“He didn’t leave because of you,” Sam says, trying to reassure. He’s too unsettled by his revelations about Dean, though, and he can hear the lie in his own voice. Knows that his brother hears it as well.
Dean confirms as much a moment later, giving Sam a strange smile and sliding his hand down Sam’s chest to his hip, where Ehwaz sits in its circle. Dean traces the rune first, and then the circle surrounding it, before brushing over his own name, etched into Sam’s flesh for everyone to see.
“It’s okay, Sam,” he says. “You and me, right? S’all that matters.”
It should make Sam’s heart sing, but instead he’s uneasier than ever, and when Dean goes back to trying to kiss him, he grips his brother’s shoulder and holds him in place while easing away a little. Another expression flits across Dean’s face—there, not there again with a speed that’s almost too fast to follow. But Sam has seen Dean scared before, any number of times, and even an instant of terror is enough for him to recognize the expression.
“Did I do something wrong?” Dean asks, so earnest.
And this—this isn’t Dean in bed with him. This isn’t the big brother Sam has been seeing in his head. Because Sam’s Dean would never have asked that, not if Sam pushed him away. His Dean would have laughed and called Sam a frigid bitch, or made some kind of “too much for you to handle” joke, or shrugged it off.
Instead of answering, Sam tugs the covers low, baring them both to mid-thigh, and takes another good, long look at his brother. For the first time in a long time, he isn’t looking for his brother’s beauty. Isn’t looking at the body he wants to touch and lick and possess any way he can.
Sam remembers noticing just a few hours ago, in a kind of absent way, how slender Dean has become. He remembers his lazy assumption that Dean just needs to start getting more exercise. But now he has Dad’s voice ringing in his ears, and he looks at Dean not with a lover’s fond eyes, or even a brother’s, but with the assessing gaze of a hunter.
Dean’s face is gaunt—a look not helped at all by the too-short cut of his hair, which Sam realizes with a start should have grown back in at least a little by now. Dean’s been keeping it shaved for some reason and not telling Sam about it. The deception isn’t much in the scheme of things, but it drops another noxious black stone on the anxious side of the scales in Sam’s mind.
And Dean hasn’t just lost a little weight. He’s not slender or even thin. He’s fucking emaciated. Sam can count his brother’s ribs just lying here looking at him, and as he casts his mind back over the past few months, he can’t remember Dean actually putting food in his mouth when Sam was looking at him more than a handful of times. But their shared tray was always empty by the end of lunch, and Dean’s fork was always full when Sam looked over, so Sam kept on assuming his brother was eating his fare share of the meal.
He ate when we were all downstairs, Sam thinks wildly. And he remembers that—Bobby piling Dean’s plate higher than Sam could tell Dean wanted it and then watching like a hawk while Dean dutifully shoveled food into his mouth. Hell, not six hours ago, Dean was downstairs eating his second helping of cake.
And then immediately went into the bathroom and shut the door to shower when they got back to the room.
“You—” Sam chokes out now, thoughtlessly. “Jesus Christ, Dean, have you been puking everything up?”
Dean’s eyes widen for a second—dismayed surprise—and then shutter. “Course not,” he says. “Don’t be stupid.”
“You have,” Sam breathes. “You—Dean, you can’t. You can’t do that!”
“Okay,” Dean agrees immediately. No more protesting that he doesn’t, no pretending it isn’t a problem, just rapid, slightly frantic capitulation. “I can put the weight back on. I know I’m not—this isn’t what you like. I can fix it.”
Sam doesn’t make it to the bathroom. He does make it onto the floor and hunched over the small wastebasket by the bed, where he pukes while Dean crouches next to him and holds back his hair. Dean’s proximity only makes his stomach lurch more—God, what has he been doing?—and it’s a while before Sam finishes and is able to slump against the nightstand.
“Gross, dude,” Dean mutters, which makes him sound almost normal, and then there are the sounds of him getting dressed and leaving the room and taking the trash with him.
Sam takes advantage of the momentary solitude to bury his head in his hands and shakes, wracked with guilt so strong it sends cramping pain through his stomach and bolts of agony through his chest. What the fuck has he been doing with Dean? Dean, who is so much more messed up than Sam ever thought possible; who has been starving himself and, when forced to it, binging and purging like a—fuck, bulimia is supposed to be a chick problem, isn’t it?
He’s a little calmer by the time Dean returns, carrying a cleaned wastebasket with him—or, well, not calm, but controlled. He’s dressed—boxers and sweatpants and a t-shirt—and sitting on the edge of the bed with his hands in his lap. Dean gives him a smile when he comes in, tentative and nervous, and says, “You get a bad piece of chicken at dinner or something?”
But Sam can tell his brother doesn’t actually think his nausea was the result of food poisoning.
“Dean, I need to ask you a question,” he says, ignoring both Dean’s attempt at deflection and the twisting in his own stomach. “And I want you to be honest with me.”
As Dean sets the wastebasket down and straightens, Sam can literally see his brother fortifying his defenses. He’s nearly opaque when he finally faces Sam, with a wide, fake smile on his mouth and blank eyes. “Sure, shoot.”
“Did you ever want me when we were growing up? Before I left for Stanford?”
Before the demon raped Dean in Vegas, Sam means but can’t say. This is close enough, anyway: will get him the same response. It’s the question he hasn’t asked—hasn’t dared to ask because he already knew, deep down, what the answer was going to be.
Dean looks at him, smile slowly fading from his face, and doesn’t answer.
Sam’s stomach curdles. He feels, suddenly, like he’s the one trying to learn to deal with reduced lung capacity instead of his brother, because he can’t get enough air. And his chest—he’s never been in this much pain. Never. He wonders if this is how Dean felt when the demon was using its power to bleed him against the cabin wall.
“Oh God,” he says softly, and he can’t hold the tears back anymore. He does get a hand up, covering his eyes—doesn’t want Dean to have to watch him fall apart like this.
But Dean’s there immediately, sitting down next to him and wrapping an arm around Sam’s shoulders. “Hey, man,” he says. “Sammy, come on. Don’t—lots of times, okay?”
Sam chokes on a laugh in the midst of his tears, because Dean is still lying, like Sam would be willing to ignore reality and accept something so obviously untrue. But then again, Sam could see where his brother might have gotten that idea. It’s what he’s been doing all this time, after all. No reason for Dean to think he’d stop now.
Jesus Christ, Dad was right.
“I’m sorry,” Sam chokes out. “God, Dean, I’m so fucking sorry.”
Dean doesn’t say anything, but he lifts the arm around Sam’s shoulders and cups the side of Sam’s head with his hand instead. With careful pressure, he draws Sam’s face around, until Sam can smell Dean, feels his warmth right in front of him, and it would be so fucking easy to do what Dean is silently urging and bury his face against his brother’s neck and let Dean hold him while he cries it out.
But Sam has been taking the easy way out for months, and he can’t make himself do that any more, so instead he chokes out, “Don’t,” and gets up off the bed.
For whatever reason, Dean doesn’t follow him. He doesn’t speak, either, sitting on the bed while Sam moves slowly around the room and struggles to get himself under control. Eventually, the tears stop and he’s able to glance back at his brother, who is watching him.
Sam meets his brother’s gaze for a moment—the same, beautiful eyes; same ridiculous lips—and then, unconsciously, he finds himself glancing down at Dean’s body. He can’t see the thinness anymore. Dean’s hidden it away with a long-sleeved shirt and baggy sweatpants, same defensive wardrobe he always wears when he leaves the room.
And for a moment, there’s a part of Sam that thinks, let it go. He said he’d start eating again, and you can make sure he sticks to it, so just let it go.
Fuck, he’s tempted. He’s so fucking tempted to give in and take what Dean has been offering, to accept all of Dean’s efforts to be pleasing and give his brother the validation and praise he’s obviously craving. Maybe Dean wasn’t into it at first, and maybe he isn’t really all that into it now, but Sam knows that his brother could learn to love it. Dean already loves him, after all, and once Sam has replaced the memories of the demon’s tainting touch with softer touches of his own, Dean would ...
Dean would what? Dean would be the perfect, faithful guardian and fuck toy the demon wanted to mould him into all along?
Sam turns his head away, grimacing at the sick taste in his mouth. His chest is a mess of disgust and revulsion and self-loathing, but the worst is the fear. The worst is the creeping, nagging suspicion that whatever taint is inside him—from the ‘baptism’ the demon mentioned, maybe, or maybe it was there from the moment he slipped, mewling and bloody, out into the world from between his mother’s legs—is starting to turn him. And he didn’t even notice. If Dad hadn’t sat him down tonight and put the idea in his head, he’d still be blithely strolling along and twisting Dean into new and pleasuring shapes.
If Sam’s stomach weren’t already decidedly empty, he thinks he’d be throwing up again right about now.
“What does it matter?” Dean says finally, breaking the silence. “I mean, okay, you caught me. So I didn’t get my jollies thinking of boning my little brother. You were just a kid, Sammy, you weren’t—”
He gestures toward Sam with a hand and doesn’t say anything else, as though that one motion sums up his point. Maybe it does.
“It matters to me, Dean,” Sam says, and it’s the truth, but for how long? How long before he loses even that tiny bit of morality? God, Dad should have shot him before he left. Sam isn’t safe. He can’t be trusted. Certainly not with Dean.
“Well, I don’t know what to say, man. You want me to beg for it? Cause I’m not proud, and I’ll beg if it’ll make you happy.”
And then, to Sam’s horror, his brother slides off the bed and gets on his knees.
“Dean,” he breathes, pleading, but Dean ignores him.
“Please,” Dean says. “Give me a shot, okay? I know I’m not—I’m not what you want, maybe, but I can learn, alright? I can—I can work on the blowjob thing.”
Sam’s stomach gives a lurch.
Dean licks his lips—practiced, but there’s a hair too much desperation in it for it to be at all enticing—and says, “We could try now. I was paying attention; I can make it good for you.”
Sam’s emotions shut down. This is it, he realizes in the dull, stutter-calm of his heart. It’s over.
Because if he was stupid enough and careless enough to give Dean a blowjob for a birthday present—a blowjob Dean obviously thinks was meant as some kind of instruction—then Sam really is too dangerous to be left within a hundred miles of his brother. No matter how much it might tear him in two to leave Dean, he has to do what Dad said. He has to leave so Dean can get his head on straight.
But he can at least leave Dean in a slightly better frame of mind.
“No,” he says, forcing himself to smile. The expression doesn’t feel quite right on his face, but it’s better than nothing. “Not tonight, okay? I’m beat.”
Dean looks up at Sam from his knees, and there’s still too much panic in his eyes as he says, “I can do it.”
Somewhere, deep and distant inside of his chest, Sam keens. But somehow, he manages to make his smile wider and more genuine. Makes himself move forward and touch his brother’s cheek—a caress Dean instantly leans into.
“I know you can, baby,” he says. “But right now I just want to hold you. Maybe make out a little.”
Dean’s eyes search his for a moment, trying to find the lie, and Sam puts all of his limping, battered heart in his own gaze. Every last shred of love he still has for his brother, all of the devotion that isn’t going to leave him until time and death crumble his body to dust. And, gradually, the tension leaves Dean’s body. His eyes soften, fond and adoring, and Sam has seen that look on his brother so many times before, like Dean’s looking at some kind of holy shrine or personal god, and it’s never turned his stomach like this.
Sam doesn’t deserve to be looked at like that. And Dean shouldn’t look at anyone like that. Ever. He’s better than that—he’s more than that. Or he could be, if Sam is only brave enough to let go.
Dean turns his head, kissing the pulse in Sam’s wrist, and then offers a relieved, almost shy smile. Sam hauls his brother to his feet and into a kiss before Dean can notice the tight twinge of pain that smile leaves in Sam’s chest. He lets Dean take the lead after that, doesn’t protest as Dean strips them both down and urges Sam first into the bathroom to brush his teeth and then back into bed.
For the first time, Sam doesn’t close his eyes as Dean kisses him and kisses him and kisses him. He’s stockpiling memories, storing up every freckle and flicker of Dean’s lashes. When Dean eventually falls asleep against him, Sam stays up to study his brother’s face, mapping out all their shared history and running his hand over the soft, shaved fuzz of Dean’s hair.
He still has Dean’s amulet, he realizes as he watches Dean sleep: hasn’t been able to bring himself to return it. He’s been saving that moment, waiting until they’re ready to leave again, getting back on the road. He’s imagined tossing the amulet over the top of the Impala, and Dean catching it, and flashing him a smile, and then they’d be off and running.
Except it isn’t going to happen like that, not now, and Sam finds the amulet after he creeps out from his brother’s arms and puts it on the nightstand for Dean to find in the morning. It looks wrong lying there, though, and it occurs to Sam that Dean might take this the wrong way—whore’s payment for services rendered. In the end, he takes the amulet back and sticks it in his pocket.
Something to remember his brother by.
Bobby ambushes him in the kitchen.
The man’s sitting at the table where Dad sat just a few hours before, two filled glasses set up and waiting. Sam is overcome by deja vu for a moment, but then he realizes that the bottle of Scotch has been replaced with tequila. And Bobby’s thundercloud expression bears no resemblance to Dad’s defeated calm.
“Sit,” Bobby orders before Sam can say anything.
“I’m going, Bobby. You aren’t talking me out of it.”
Bobby looks up at him for a moment, mouth tight and eyes narrowed, and then says, “Park your ass in the chair, Sam.”
He doesn’t say anything more, but then again he doesn’t need to. Despite the slippers and the worn bathrobe and the lack of his usual cap, Bobby’s making the ‘or else’ perfectly clear with nothing but his tone of voice.
Dropping his bag onto the floor, Sam sits.
Bobby releases Sam with his eyes, picking up his glass and taking a swig. Sam waits, not touching his own drink, while Bobby grimaces around the burn and puts the glass back down.
“Your daddy’s been chomping at the bit to cut and run ever since we got here, so I can’t say I’m all that surprised he finally left, but I thought at least one of you had some sticking power.”
“I’m not helping him,” Sam says, which isn’t exactly what he means, but he can’t bring himself to say the other out loud just yet.
“Yeah, cause his whole damn family ditching him in one night is gonna be just what the doctor ordered.”
Sam sighs. “I didn’t tell Dad to leave.”
“Damn it, Sam!” Bobby snaps, although Sam notices that he keeps his voice low, which means he doesn’t want to wake Dean. Which means he isn’t going to resort to force to keep Sam here. Sam didn’t really think he would, but he relaxes slightly at the confirmation anyway.
“Dean’ll manage,” he says softly. “You’ll take care of him.”
“Dean’s gonna be a fucking mess and you know it,” Bobby shoots back.
Sam drops his eyes because, yeah, he knows. He knows better than Bobby does, probably, and he feels guilty as hell leaving his brother to that. But he doesn’t have any other options.
“I’m hurting him, Bobby,” he whispers, making himself say it. “I—I love him so fucking much, but all I ever do is hurt him, and as—as long as I’m here, he isn’t going to get any better. He’s just going to keep trying to twist himself into whatever he thinks I want, and I—Bobby, I don’t know that I’m going to stop him.”
Bobby heaves out a sigh. “Hell, boy.”
“And it’s my fault anyway, that he’s like this. If I hadn’t—if I didn’t want him, the demon never would have—it wouldn’t have touched him. None of this would have happened.”
Bobby is quiet for a long moment, and Sam realizes that they still haven’t discussed this. These past few months, it never seemed to come up. Or maybe neither of them wanted it to come up. Sam glances toward Bobby cautiously, trying to gauge the man’s disgust, but Bobby still looks more disgruntled with the current situation than anything else.
“I’ve known for a while now,” Bobby says finally. “Ever since you were—oh, I dunno, sixteen, I guess. I don’t know whether you knew what you wanted yourself then, but it wasn’t hard for anyone else to spot. Like the sun wasn’t shining whenever he was more than six feet away from you. He took Sarah Feld out to the movies one night and I swear, I damn near throttled you before he got back. Skulking around the house like a ditched prom date.”
“Did you tell Dean?” Sam asks, rubbing his finger against the condensation on the side of his glass.
“No. Tried to talk to your daddy about it, got a sore jaw for my troubles. Guess I got to have the last laugh there.” His mouth twitches into a humorless smile and he takes another sip of tequila. “Anyway, point I’m trying to make is that you never did anything about it. He got back high as a kite from that date and you were jealous as hell but you didn’t drag him down, and you didn’t bad mouth the girl, either.”
Sam gets where Bobby’s going with this—he’s heard that spiel before, from Dean’s mouth even—and now he says, “I know I didn’t rape him. But I can’t—I can’t keep benefiting from it. And you know that Dean’s too—I can’t be the only thing in his world.”
Bobby just grunts, which means that he agrees with Sam and doesn’t want to admit it.
“Me leaving is the only way he’ll ever try to figure out what he wants for himself and you know it.”
“You leave now and he’s gonna react like a heroin addict who just got jerked off his fix. You can’t just walk out on him without so much as a word, you—”
“No, Bobby. That’s the only way I can leave.” Because it’s difficult enough now, without Dean looking at him. Without having to see the devastation in his brother’s eyes. If he had to talk to Dean first, he’d never make it out the door.
“If you’re so set on doing this, Sam, then fine, but don’t you dare just disappear on him. You call him. You write. Hell, send him a fucking postcard.”
Sam doesn’t say anything. He can’t. Can’t promise what Bobby is asking, because at Dean’s first pleading request he’ll fold. He’ll drive all night and day to get back here, pulled in by Dean’s gravity and then they’ll be stuck like this forever. Dean will be stunted and broken and twisted into Sam’s shadow forever.
And Dean deserves more than that.
“Is that all?” Sam makes himself say. “Can I go now?”
There’s a beat of silence and then Bobby says, darkly, “I oughta beat you til you come to your senses, boy.”
Sam pushes back in his chair, grabs hold of his bag, and stands up. “Tell him I’m sorry, okay? And I know—I know he’s not going to believe it for a while, but tell him it isn’t his fault, and that I didn’t leave because I don’t love him.”
“Fuck you, Sam,” Bobby says, not looking at him.
Somehow, despite the desolate loneliness already sinking into his chest, Sam finds it in himself to be hurt by the dismissal.
“Bye, Bobby,” he whispers back, and then heads out the door.
He keeps expecting Bobby to come after him, or maybe for some sixth sense to wake up his brother and send Dean stumbling out into the snow, barefoot and shivering. But it’s quiet: just Sam with his pluming breath and the dark, snow-covered heaps of cars.
He detours briefly to pause by the lump he knows is the Impala, bent and twisted and likely starting to rust beneath its white blanket. He rests one hand on the roof, burning his palm against the snow, and glances up at the second floor of Bobby’s house, to the darkened window of the room he and Dean have been sharing.
Then, before he can lose his nerve, he hoists his bag onto his shoulder and starts walking.