Chapter Text
This time around, Sam greets the holiday season with open arms. It’s stunning how different it feels this year. He spends Thanksgiving at Bobby’s with Dean and Erica—who’s actually civil for once around Bobby’s gruffly cheerful influence. Bonham gets underfoot and steals an entire turkey breast for himself, but even when Sam twists his ankle in the ensuing chase, he can’t stop laughing.
And the way that Dean insists on checking Sam out himself after everything has calmed down again—fingers light and sure as they explore the site of the swelling—makes all the pain worth it. Sam doesn’t even mind having to limp around for the next week or so.
Humboldt’s Festival of Lights occurs not downtown, but in the park. Sam was supposed to help set up this year—Grant Schneider was joking about Sam being tall enough to work without a ladder when he all but drafted him—but of course, his bad ankle has put him out of commission. He heads over anyway, and huddles by the back of his pickup truck with ten red thermoses and ten blue. The thermoses are color-coded to ensure that the men busy stringing all the pines with lights know whether they’re getting hot cocoa or cider spiced with a dash of rum when they come over to warm up.
And so that Sam knows which to offer the kids who have wandered down to watch their fathers work.
Dean’s shifts keep him at the Municipal Bar for most of the set-up time, but he shows up toward the end of the second day—for the sole purpose of causing trouble, as far as Sam can tell. Because his brother stands at the base of one of the trees for a while, squinting up at Tex—who’s working toward the top of his ladder, almost ten feet above Dean—and then squats down and starts gathering some snow in his hands. There isn’t much on the ground yet—it’s barely an inch deep, grass showing through everywhere—but there’s plenty for Dean’s purpose.
“What’re you doing?” Tex shouts down, twisting on his ladder in an attempt to get a better look at Dean.
“Making some snowballs,” Dean answers matter-of-factly. Finished with his first, he sets it aside and starts packing another.
“There’s kids here, Singer,” Grant shouts from his own perch, two trees over. “You’re supposed to be a role model!”
Dean tilts his head as though considering. But even from his position back by the truck, Sam’s certain that it isn’t anything more than an act.
Sure enough, a moment later Dean shouts back, “You’re right, Grant. Thanks!” Then he turns toward the clump of kids and calls, “All right troops, we need some ammo. I want you all ready to fire when your dads come down.”
There’s a choir of curses and insults thrown in Dean’s direction from the men in the trees as the kids scamper to obey. Of course, it takes a couple of minutes for Humboldt’s Festival of Lights volunteers to figure out how to hook the lights in their hands around a convenient ladder rung, and then more time to climb down, and by the time they reach the bottom, Dean and his troops are ready for them.
It isn’t so much a battle as it is a massacre—there isn’t enough snow for the adults to retaliate once they’ve been pelted—and after a few minutes the park is full of yelling kids being carried around and playfully shaken by their fathers. The men are growling, mock furious, but Sam can tell that the kids can see right through the facades of anger, because they’re laughing uncontrollably between shouts.
Sam’s grinning himself, safely away from the mêlée, and his smile only widens when Grant carries his daughter over and plunks her down in the bed of the truck next to Sam. Lizzie is giggling, and there’s snow dusting Grant’s hair, which he wipes clear with a snort.
“Every year,” he mutters, taking a blue thermos while Sam pours Lizzie some hot cocoa out of a red. “I swear to God, he begs off helping just so he can show up and sabotage us. Good role model, my ass.”
“Daddy, you said a bad word,” Lizzie points out, holding her Styrofoam cup in both hands.
“Yeah, Grant,” Sam agrees with mock sincerity. “That’s one for the swear jar.”
The look Grant tosses him in return is not amused. “Notice you managed to avoid getting pelted. Maybe next year you can talk to your boyfriend. Put in a good word for the rest of us.”
Sam’s smile freezes at the label, and his heart flutters alarmingly. For a single, breathless moment, he wants—oh fuck, he wants it to be true. He wants to be able to claim Dean that way. But he can’t. Not yet.
Clearing his throat, he says, “He’s not—”
“Gonna listen to the abominable snowman? Damn straight I’m not.”
Sam is just starting to turn to face his brother when he feels his collar grabbed and yanked back. Ice pours down his neck and back, making him flinch forward and leap off the back of the truck with a choked out, “Shit!”
He vaguely notes Lizzie announcing that he has also said a bad word, but he’s too busy flopping around in an attempt to get the snow out from his shirt. Which is a difficult task, since it’s tucked into the back of his pants right now.
“Dance, Chicken Man, dance!” Dean booms, and Sam twists around to glare at his brother while he finally gets hold of his shirttails and shakes them out.
Dean is leaning against the truck, a smug smirk plastered across his face. When he sees he has Sam’s attention, he leans over and high fives both Grant and Lizzie.
“Did I do it right?” Lizzie asks, crawling across the truck bed to curl against Dean’s side.
Dean lifts his arm to make room, not seeming to care when she spills some of her hot chocolate on his coat. “Perfect. You can be my decoy any time, sweetheart.”
Sam can’t tell Dean off for dumping snow down his shirt the way he’d like to with a little kid around, so he settles for glaring at both men. He wasn’t thinking about his ankle when his back felt like it was on fire, but he’s sure as hell thinking about it now. Damn thing is throbbing and hot as he limps back toward the truck.
“Aw, c’mon, Sammy,” Dean says. “You didn’t really think I’d leave you out, did you?”
“I’m injured, Dean.”
Dean snorts, absently patting Lizzie’s arm as she grips the front of his coat with one hand. “Yeah, sure. You’re the walking wounded, all right.”
And yeah, okay, maybe Dean has a point. After all, it’s not like Sam hasn’t run through the woods with worse. Isn’t like he hasn’t seen Dean sprint through the trees with his hand clamped to his side and blood seeping through his fingers. After all of that, he guesses he can’t expect Dean to baby him over something as simple as a sprained ankle.
But that snow burned, damn it. And Dean’s going to be too cautious for Sam to get him back anytime soon.
“I’m gonna marry Dean when I grow up,” Lizzie announces suddenly.
Grant grunts around the mouthful of cider he just took. He swallows quickly and then says, “Dean’s kind of taken, sweetie.”
Sam glances at his brother, waiting for Dean to correct the man’s assumption, and finds Dean already looking at him. Their eyes catch and the humor bleeds from Dean’s expression. He’s still smiling, though—still relaxed and content—and Sam doesn’t know what to make of it.
Dean excuses himself soon after, taking himself back to the Impala and driving off, but Sam’s nerves don’t calm with his brother’s absence. He feels jittery and flushed all the way home. When he falls asleep that night to the fruitless rattle of his radiator, he dreams of the curve of Dean’s smile and wakes up warm.
Last year, Sam was aware that his brother ran a food cart in the park on the weekends, but he never felt welcome enough to show his face. This time around, he stays away the first week—unsettled by Dean’s silence at the truck the other day—but he can’t stop himself from drifting over on the second Saturday. He’s due at Dean’s for dinner tonight anyway, and he figures it won’t be too weird if he shows up at the park for a bit beforehand.
It’s bitterly cold outside, down in the single digits even without the wind, and he grunts when he parks and gets out of his truck. Pulling his heavy woolen cap more snugly over his ears, he heads toward the clump of people gathered at the edge of the skating pond.
And despite the temperature, there are people out today: little kids bundled up in snowsuits and scarves, teenagers doggedly pretending they’re immune to the cold, one or two adults who actually enjoy this kind of weather. And there’s Dean, buried somewhere beneath a parka that puffs him out to two times his normal size. He’s standing hunched over a metal hotdog cart, although the words on the side proclaim that there’s cider and hot roasted nuts inside instead. From the number of paper cones and Styrofoam cups clutched in the hands of people along the shore, he’s doing pretty good business.
“Hey,” Sam says, coming up alongside his brother.
“Hey,” Dean grunts back. His lips are pressed together and he looks decidedly uncomfortable, hands shoved in his pockets as he shivers. “What’re you doing here, man?”
“Just thought I’d come by and check out your set up. That okay?”
The question is just a formality, though, and Sam isn’t surprised when Dean shrugs. “Whatever steams your clams, dude.” Then he jerks his head in a nod at Sam’s pocket. “Hey, what time is it?”
It takes some effort, but Sam manages to get his phone out and pokes one of the buttons with his mittened hand. “Two thirty-seven,” he reads.
Dean swears under his breath.
“What?”
“I’m gonna be missing pieces when I finally get home,” Dean answers sourly. “Seriously, I’m freezing my goddamned nuts off out here.”
“Your coat looks pretty warm,” Sam offers, and then has to step back for a moment as one of the skaters comes over for a refill on their cider. He watches the transaction casually at first, and then jerks to attention as he sees Dean take his hands out of his pockets to pour the cider and accept the teenager’s fifty cents.
Fifteen below with wind-chill and his stupid, idiotic brother isn’t wearing any gloves.
Sam manages to keep his mouth shut until the kid is gone and then steps in close and hisses, “Where the fuck are your gloves?”
Dean’s jaw clenches. “I spilled cider on them about half an hour ago. Figured no gloves were better than wet ones.”
“Jesus, Dean, you’re gonna get frostbite. Here.” Sam starts pulling off his own mittens, only to be stopped by Dean’s hand—fingers already white from the cold—on his arm.
“Dude, I can’t work in mittens.”
Which is true, but also a little infuriating. Running the food cart isn’t anywhere near as important as Dean’s health, as far as Sam is concerned. He thinks for a few, precious seconds and then, with a resolute expression, grabs Dean’s wrists. The leather cuffs are an obvious, hard line even through Dean’s coat and Sam’s own mittens, and Sam’s stomach gives the same anxious half-twist it always does when he lets himself think about what they mean.
Pushing those darker thoughts away, he draws his brother’s hands closer.
“What’re you doing?” Dean demands. His voice is a little sharp, but Sam can tell that that’s mostly from uncertainty, and anyway, Dean isn’t actually resisting.
“Just let me try this, okay?” Sam urges, and then, after a quick breath to prepare himself, drags his brother's hands up underneath his coat.
Dean flinches as he figures out what Sam is after, hands twisting in Sam’s grasp, but Sam ignores that belated—and halfhearted—show of reluctance in favor of forcing his brother’s hands beneath his sweater and t-shirt. He flinches himself at the first brush of frozen fingertips against his stomach—fuck, Dean’s hands are like blocks of ice—but catches himself quickly and moves forward into the cold.
Dean has stopped trying to pull away, his eyes wide and locked low on Sam’s stomach, like he can see his hands through all the layers of clothing. Something in his expression reminds Sam that he just trampled over a whole lot of unspoken boundaries, and the muscles of his stomach twitch again—this time, for a different reason.
“This doesn’t have to mean anything,” he says, keeping his voice quiet so no one will overhear them. “Just let me warm your hands up a little so I can go buy you new gloves without having to worry about your fingers falling off before I get back, all right?”
Dean is silent, his expression unreadable, but he isn’t pulling away. After a moment, he presses his hands flat against Sam’s skin and slides them higher, leaving a line of cold in their wake. He’s just looking for warmer skin, but it still feels like a caress, and Sam’s heart races.
“You don’t think this is weird?” Dean asks after a few minutes.
“No,” Sam lies, and then sucks in a sharp breath as Dean flips his hands over and drags his icy knuckles around to Sam’s sides. Fuck, that’s cold.
“People are going to get the wrong idea,” Dean points out, eyes still fastened somewhere around Sam’s stomach.
“Are they?” Sam asks.
Dean shifts his hands around to the small of Sam’s back, fingertips brushing against the waistband of his jeans, and doesn’t answer.
Christmas is heralded by an increasing nervousness that settles into Sam’s bones and stomach. On the one hand, things with Dean are clearly going better than ever. On the other, lines are getting blurred faster than Sam is completely comfortable with.
His stupid attempt to warm Dean’s hands up before running back to town for gloves somehow turns into an entire afternoon of Dean feeling his way across Sam’s stomach and back and lower chest. Sam keeps meaning to go whenever Dean has to take his hands back to serve someone a cone of nuts or hand them a cup of cider, but before he can quite manage to excuse himself Dean’s hands are back on his skin. And then it’s easy to tell himself he’ll wait just a little longer, especially with the way Dean is shifting his body in close and maneuvering Sam around so that Sam’s bulk blocks the bitter wind.
Dinner that night is an awkward, mostly silent affair, made even more uncomfortable by Erica’s presence. She senses that something is off almost immediately, and then spends the rest of the meal alternating between watching Dean worriedly and glaring at Sam. Dean’s too busy staring determinedly at his own plate to notice.
Three days later, Sam is helping his brother clean up after their usual Tuesday meal at Bobby’s. He’s just started to wash some of the dishes in the sink when a hand lands on the back of his neck. Dean keeps on talking—going on about how much of a bitch it is to shop for Bobby—all the while rubbing his thumb across the nape of Sam’s neck while he stands close enough for Sam’s entire body to tingle with his brother’s heat. Sam waits for almost two minutes without moving, not sure what to do with this.
When it has finally become clear that Dean has no idea what he’s doing, Sam clears his throat and says, “Dean?”
Dean stiffens instantly. The fingers playing across Sam’s skin freeze. Aside from the running water, it’s silent in the room.
“So,” Dean says finally in a too-loud voice, taking his hand back. “How about those Cowboys, huh?”
It’s such a bad cover that Sam can’t help laughing.
Next time, it’s Sam’s fault. At dinner Thursday night, Dean’s complaining about a crick in his shoulders that he can’t work out. Before Sam knows what he’s doing, he’s sitting on the couch with Dean on the floor between his legs. He has his hands all over Dean’s upper back, hunting out knots and massaging them with both thumbs, and it isn’t until Dean makes a quiet little gasping noise that he remembers what this kind of thing does to his brother. He goes still with the memory, images of the full body massage he gave Dean in Vegas filling his head.
Dean turns his head to one side, offering Sam his profile, and there’s a long moment of charged silence. Then Dean asks, “You need me to ditch the sweater?”
Sam’s cock fills so quickly it hurts, and he drops his head back, shutting his eyes and swallowing. Erica’s just upstairs, he reminds himself. Also, this is in no way a good idea.
“No,” he answers finally, forcing his hands to lift from his brother’s back. “I, uh. I should probably be getting home.”
Dean doesn’t move, and Sam’s certain they’re going to have to talk about it. They can’t keep ignoring the growing electricity between them forever.
Except after almost a minute of tension, Dean swallows and says in a thick, hoarse voice, “Yeah. I guess you should.”
Sam tells himself he’s going to be more careful after that, but Dean’s giving out some kind of pheromone or something, and he keeps finding his hands on Dean’s bicep, or his shoulder—and once, horribly, his stomach. He isn’t the only one having a problem, either. Dean’s just as bad as Sam is at keeping his hands to himself, maybe a little worse.
Sam can’t decide if that makes everything easier or just really, really fucked.
He spends Christmas Eve at Bobby’s—at Bobby’s insistence. Sam accuses the man of having gone sentimental in his old age and gets himself put to work cleaning and oiling all of Bobby’s firearms. Meanwhile, Bonham sleeps sprawled across Bobby’s lap while Bobby watches It’s A Wonderful Life on TV and criticizes Sam’s cleaning skills during the commercial breaks.
Sam could think of worse ways to spend the holiday.
In the morning, he helps Bobby load up one of the salvage yard cars with presents and booze, feeling decidedly odd as he handles the brightly wrapped packages. He hasn’t had this sort of thing since Stanford and Jess, and it didn’t really feel right even then.
When she brought him home with her, that last year, there was a surreal kind of glow draped over the entire trip. Sam spent most of his time searching for the seam in the costume: the razor blade in the candy. He kept expecting to touch one of the presents under the tree and have his hand come away covered in spray paint.
He’s a little more accepting this time around—a little more used to this kind of thing after a year and a half of living in Humboldt—but it’s still difficult to believe that this is his life now. He can’t figure out how he stumbled across Normal, long after he gave up any hope of achieving it.
Sam loads Dean’s gift into the car last—in the back seat, rather than in the trunk with the rest. God, he hopes that he isn’t screwing up with this one. He hopes Dean gets the sentiment behind it—that his brother appreciates what Sam is trying to do, what he’s trying to say. No guarantees it won’t blow up in his face, though, and he sighs as he covers the gift with a red and black flannel blanket and then shuts the door.
As worried as Sam is about how Dean’s going to receive that present, it’s the one in his pocket that’s really bothering him. The box feels hot when Sam puts a hand on it through his coat. Feels charged.
Timing is everything with this particular gift, and Sam still hasn’t made up his mind whether tonight is the right moment. Maybe he should wait a little longer.
Probably he should wait.
“You okay, kid?” Bobby asks as he walks across the yard, jingling the keys in one hand.
Not really, no, but they don’t have time to delve into everything going through Sam’s head right now. Besides, this is one of those problems that isn’t going to resolve itself any other way than jumping off the high board into the deep end. Either Sam will figure out how to swim back to the surface or he won’t, simple as that.
But that understanding doesn’t stop him from licking his lips nervously as he gets into the passenger seat, and when Bobby gets behind the wheel next to him, he asks, “You ever wonder how you got here?”
“Oh, I know how I got here,” Bobby answers. There’s a wry twist to his mouth as he starts the engine. “Mostly I just wonder how I could’ve been stupid enough to let myself get dragged here by you two chuckleheads.”
“Must be our charming personalities,” Sam returns, and tries to make his right leg stop jigging up and down in the footwall. With effort, he manages to rein in most of the nervous energy coursing through him.
Bobby snorts as he pulls down the drive. “You’re about as charming as a couple of bipolar porcupines. But you’re family—you know that, right?” The man’s voice is unexpectedly serious as he glances over at Sam, and hearing it put so bluntly dulls the edge of the anxiety tumbling around Sam’s insides.
“Yeah,” he agrees, slipping one hand into his pocket and closing his hand around the box he finds there. “I know.”
“Good. Then take an old man at his word and stop thinking about it so much. You’re gonna give yourself an aneurism.”
Sam slides his thumb over one edge of the box as his lips twitch up into a smile. “Yes, sir.”
“Don’t sass me, kid.”
“Sir, yes, sir,” Sam shoots back.
Bobby rolls his eyes and reaches over to turn up the radio.
Dean’s house is just as brightly decorated as Sam imagined it would be when he spent Christmas alone last year. Dean wouldn’t let him help set things up—that’s something he does with Erica, kind of a tradition—and now he follows Sam around as Sam looks everything over. He’s smiling, but there’s a nervous cast to it, and it doesn’t take much insight to realize that Dean is trying to make up for all those missed Christmases—not just the years they were apart, but the others as well, when they were growing up and just didn’t have the resources to celebrate properly.
“This is great, man,” Sam offers when they’re finally standing in front of the tree.
“Erica’s got a real eye for design,” Dean replies, and Sam looks past his brother and finds Erica watching with the closest thing she ever seems to manage to a friendly expression.
“It’s great,” Sam says again, this time pitching his voice for her.
Erica shrugs and tucks a curl of hair back behind her ear. “Dean actually did all of the work,” she says. “I mostly ate cookies and directed.”
“Don’t worry, dude. I made plenty,” Dean promises. His grin has widened at the civil interaction between them, and now he claps Sam on the shoulder and asks, “You want some eggnog? I’ll get you some eggnog.”
He’s gone before Sam has a chance to respond, and Bobby is already in the kitchen putzing around, which leaves Sam alone with his brother’s roommate. Sam swallows thickly, shoving his hands into his pockets and looking around at the decorations.
“It’s really nice,” he says again after a moment.
“I thought you’d be gone by now.”
Ah yes. Here’s the Erica Sam has come to know and love. He sighs inwardly, dropping his own pretense at friendliness to reply, “I told you I wasn’t going anywhere.”
Sam waits for the scathing response that’s bound to follow, but Erica doesn’t say anything. She just stands there looking at him with a tiny furrow between her eyebrows and her lips pursed in thought. Her arms are crossed in front of her stomach, protectively, and as Sam replays her words in his head, he realizes that she sounded less angry and more ... actually, he’s not sure what she sounded like. He doesn’t know her well enough to read whatever emotion was in her voice.
She’s still staring when Dean comes back juggling three glasses of frothy, cream-colored liquid.
“Here,” he says, coming toward Sam. “The one with the nutmeg’s yours. No whisky, right?”
“Yeah,” Sam agrees, taking the glass. “Thanks.”
“I don’t get how you do it, man,” Dean replies as he heads back toward Erica and hands her one of the two remaining glasses. “Stuff’s foul without a little cheer.”
“A little?” Bobby coughs as he comes into the living room carrying his own glass. “What’d you do, dump an entire bar in here?”
Dean grins unrepentantly. “Two parts egg, one part nog, ten parts Johnny Walker.”
“Christ,” Bobby mutters as he walks over to the couch and drops down. “Anyone lights a match and the whole damn house’ll go up.”
Sam tries to laugh along with his brother at the joke, but too much of his attention is taken up by the way that Erica is still watching him—not overtly hostile, he doesn’t think, but not happy with his presence either. She watches him all afternoon, and then keeps on right through dinner. And by then, it’s gotten uncomfortable enough and blatant enough that even Dean finally notices, gazing back and forth between them with a frown.
Sam readies himself for the inevitable confrontation, sure that Dean is going to assume he’s done something wrong. He’s surprised when Dean instead sends him out into the living room with Bobby while Erica stays behind in the kitchen to help Dean clean up. Sam isn’t sure what’s going on at first, but then there are an awkward few moments where Dean’s voice gets loud enough for him to make out, “... hell is your problem?”
He exchanges a quick glance with Bobby and, without a word, Bobby turns on the TV, flips around until he lands on TNT’s traditional A Christmas Story marathon, and then pushes the volume up as high as it will go. Dean comes around the corner a moment later, the color high in his face and his eyes snapping.
And Sam knew that his brother was having an argument with Erica, but having to actually see the effects of it on Dean’s face makes him feel even guiltier. He sinks deeper into the couch, trying to make himself small as Dean glares past him at Bobby.
“Go ahead and turn it up some more!” Dean says, yelling to make himself heard over the noise of the television. “I don’t think they can hear it over in Russia!”
Bobby continues to watch the screen as he calls back, “Yeah, well, we couldn’t hear over all the ruckus you were making in the kitchen.”
Dean goes white at that, eyes flicking briefly to Sam before sliding away again. His throat works for a few moments and then, without another word, he turns and disappears back into the kitchen.
Message delivered, Bobby immediately lowers the volume to a more bearable level. Sam gives it a few minutes and then offers, “Thanks.”
“Don’t mention it,” Bobby grunts without taking his eyes off the screen. “And don’t go beating yourself up about it, either. That’s one powder keg that’s been waiting to blow for a while now.”
That’s easy for Bobby to say, but Sam knows it’s more complicated than the man is trying to make it. Maybe the timing isn’t his fault, but he knows damn well that his continued presence is what has been packing the keg full of blasting powder. He’s noticed that things between his brother and Erica have been getting more and more strained over the last few weeks—ever since that afternoon when she came home early and found Dean all but plastered to Sam’s back while he guided Sam’s hands in chopping leeks for the stew he was making.
And nothing the man can say can remove the fact that they’re fighting about him.
“Maybe I should go,” he says, fidgeting and tossing a glance toward the kitchen.
“Only if you want to walk home. I drove, remember?”
Oh. Right.
And that’s when Erica storms out of the kitchen, not so much as glancing in Sam and Bobby’s direction on her way to the front closet. Not that that’s enough for Sam to miss the glimmer of tear tracks on her cheeks.
“I’m going out to pick up some more wine,” she announces as she yanks her coat on, voice thick with tears, and then she’s outside and slamming the door behind her.
Sam swallows, feeling like the world’s biggest asshole, and starts to turn back around, only to freeze as he catches sight of his brother standing in the doorway leading from the living room into the dining room.
Dean isn’t looking at Sam. He’s staring past him at the front door, mouth turned down and eyes unhappy. And, Sam thinks, a little puzzled. Like he isn’t sure what just happened himself.
Then his gaze slips from door to Sam.
For a long, drawn out moment, they regard each other quietly, and then Dean lets out a slow breath and rallies, plastering a fake smile on his face.
“Okay, so who wants dessert?”
When Erica still isn’t back two hours later, Sam figures it’s time to stop not talking about it. He waits until Dean gets up from the couch to stroll into the kitchen for a refill on his eggnog and then gets up and follows his brother in. From the understanding weight of Bobby’s eyes on his back as he goes, they aren’t going to be interrupted.
In the kitchen, he finds Dean leaning next to the fridge with both hands curled around the marble countertop. Dean’s head is lowered, and although he has to hear Sam approaching—Sam’s deliberately making as much noise as he can—he doesn’t turn around.
“Dean?” Sam calls tentatively.
Dean’s head comes around a little at that, enough for Sam to see a sliver of his brother’s face as he says, “You need a refill?”
“No,” Sam answers, putting his own glass down on the island as he walks past it. “I came in here to talk.”
He half expects Dean to play stupid, but instead Dean sighs and says, “She’s coming back. She just ... needed to blow off a little steam.”
Sam is close enough now to touch, so he does—lightly at first, cautious and careful and really fucking unsure how it’s going to be received. When nothing happens, he dares to increase the pressure until he can feel the line of his brother’s spine beneath his palm.
“I’m sorry,” he offers, rubbing Dean’s lower back with slow, comforting movements. “I didn’t mean to screw things up for you.”
Dean shakes his head. “Not your fault. It’s just—for a long time, we were all we had, y’know? And now I’m still all she’s got, and you and me, we, uh—we—you and, and—”
He trails off and Sam becomes aware that he’s gone and overstepped the boundaries again; pressed up close behind his brother while his hands slide up Dean’s back to the nape of his neck and begin to knead. He should stop while he’s ahead and he knows it, but Dean picks that moment to drop his head forward in a clear request for more and Sam can’t help himself.
He digs his thumbs into the pressure points he knows are there, massaging and draining some of the tension from his brother’s muscles. The tips of his fingers brush up through the lower fringe of Dean’s hair, so soft, and his breath catches at the faint tremor that runs through Dean’s body. Sam feels flushed and light-headed, intoxicated by the sight of his hands on his brother’s skin.
“You and me what?” he breathes.
“Sam...”
It’s the only thing Dean says—nothing more than a low, reluctant exhalation—but there’s enough emotion coloring the word to drown Sam. There’s enough to drown them both if they aren’t careful, because Dean isn’t ready, no matter what sort of signals he’s sending out right now, and Sam ... Sam doesn’t know that he’s ready for whatever’s happening either.
“Tell me to back off,” he pleads, watching helplessly as his right hand slides forward to curl loosely around Dean’s throat. When Dean doesn’t say anything, Sam rests his forehead against the back of his brother’s head and buries his nose in Dean’s hair. Breathes in the scent of Dean and whatever spicy, citrus-infused shampoo he’s using nowadays and feels a flare of heat unfurl low in his groin. His heart rattles alarmingly in his chest: a rollercoaster with the brakes torn off.
Dean swallows—the movement intimate and vulnerable trapped against Sam’s hand—and Sam squeezes his eyes shut. He can feel Dean’s pulse against his fingers, as agitated and out-of-control as his own, and one of them needs to stop this. One of them needs to man up and move away.
“Dean,” he begs. “Dean, please, tell me—tell me—”
Except Sam’s not sure what command he’s looking for any longer, and his whole body is trembling with the effort it’s taking not to push his left hand up underneath Dean’s shirt, get some warm skin against his fingertips. He hooks them in the chain around Dean’s neck instead, giving the medallion a tug, and Dean turns. Dean turns but doesn’t move back or push Sam away, leaving them chest-to-chest and breathing in each other’s spent air.
Dean is staring at Sam’s mouth as though mesmerized, his breathing shallow but missing that sharp, panicked edge that would snap Sam out of his warm haze. Sam’s right hand fell to his side when his brother turned, but his left is still tangled in Dean’s chain, and he can’t figure out how to let go.
Dean’s eyes are too bright, too intent. When Sam licks his lips—they’re too dry, like his throat, feels like he’s in danger of catching fire at any moment—Dean’s hand comes up, blindly groping for Sam’s shirt and bunching the fabric up by his collar.
“Sammy,” Dean says, soft and yearning, and Sam can feel himself falling toward his brother’s mouth when the front door slams.
Suddenly, Dean is pushing instead of tugging at Sam’s shirt, and Sam wastes no time in getting his own hand untangled from his brother’s medallion and stepping back. He smoothes his hair down, certain that she’s going to know, that she’ll take one look and call out a lynching party, and then Erica is rounding the corner and coming into the kitchen. She stops almost immediately, looking back and forth between the two of them and holding a bottle-shaped paper bag in her hands.
When Sam chances a glance at Dean, his brother is flushed and guilty looking.
“Oh,” Dean says. “Erica, hey. Sam and I were. Uh. We were just washing some dishes.”
Sam resists the urge to slap a hand over his face—or possibly over Dean’s mouth before his brother can dig them a deeper hole. Dean hasn’t been this bad of a liar since he tried telling Dad a Jabberwocky scratched the Impala up after Dean miscalculated how much room he had to get past a slow-moving truck on a narrow side street in Philly. He waits for Erica to say something scathing or flare up again, but she just cuts her eyes to the side and lifts the bottle in her hands.
“I found us some wine.”
“Great!” Dean replies, too loud and overly hearty, and then claps his hands together. “You hear that, Sam? Erica found us some wine! How about we all go into the living room with Bobby and have a drink. Yeah? Okie dokie, then!”
And he’s striding past Sam and Erica without waiting for a response, rubbing at the back of his neck with one hand. He shoots Sam a quick glance once he’s past Erica and safely out of sight, wide-eyed and spooked, and then disappears around the corner.
Erica shifts her grip on the bottle, paper bag crinkling, and then takes a deep breath and looks directly at Sam.
“Help me get some glasses?”
Sam hesitates for a moment, looking for the hidden barb in the request—he and Dean were just the complete opposite of smooth and convincing, after all. Even though nothing actually happened—nothing Sam can define or quantify, anyway—Erica has to be imagining all sorts of indiscretions. Sam’s surprised she isn’t throwing the bottle at his head right now.
But Erica is just standing there waiting, somehow looking even smaller than usual, and Sam realizes that she’s lost some weight over the last few months. She’s slender now, and it should look good on her but it doesn’t. She doesn’t look as healthy and vibrant as she did when she was carrying those extra pounds—instead, she looks drawn and tired. She looks defeated.
It doesn’t make Sam feel triumphant like he wants it to.
Somberly, he goes over to the cabinet he knows contains all of their glassware and reaches inside. One by one, he takes the wine glasses down and sets them on the counter—could grab all three at once, but he wants the extra time to collect himself. Even moving at a snail’s pace, it doesn’t take him long to finish, and then he’s shutting the cabinet door again and turning to face Erica.
“I’m not sorry about coming back,” he says, trying to keep his voice gentle. “And I’m not sorry I’m getting along better with Dean. But I’m not—Erica, I’m not taking him away from you.”
Because that’s what this is really about. It has to be.
Erica’s eyes glitter in the bright kitchen lights, and Sam feels a faint, surprising stab of pity as she blinks quickly in an attempt to keep her tears at bay. She turns away after a moment, giving him her back, and clutches the wine closer to her chest with a crinkle of paper. The whisper of her parting words as she heads out into the other room is almost too soft for Sam to catch.
“You already have.”
Sam’s sure that the rest of the night is going to be unbearably awkward after his short but brutal conversation with Erica in the kitchen, and it is pretty bad for a while. No one seems to know what to say in the living room, and Sam keeps expecting Bobby to get fed up with the mess and call the three of them out on it. But Bobby is staring at the flat screen like his life depends on it, exchanging glass after glass of wine for whisky-laced eggnog. When A Christmas Story ends its current run and loops around to the beginning again, his fingers don’t so much as twitch where they’re resting on the remote.
Just when Sam is actually beginning to consider walking home after all—losing a couple fingers to frostbite seems preferable to enduring the tension in the house—Dean mutters something under his breath. From the glower on his face, it isn’t anything complimentary, and Sam jumps a little where he’s sitting on the couch next to Bobby as his brother surges to his feet. In her own armchair, Erica’s head comes up, but she doesn’t unfurl from her hunched over, knees-to-chest position. Her eyes are wide on Dean as he comes toward her.
Dean is moving with deliberation, jaw set in a determined line that Sam is all too familiar with, and a moment later he grabs Erica out of her chair and hoists her up onto his shoulder in a fireman’s carry.
“Dean!” she shouts, flailing her arms in a belated attempt to push him away. “What are you—put me down, damn it!”
Instead, Dean heads in the direction of the front hall, tossing a causal, “Excuse us,” in Bobby and Sam’s direction as he passes. There’s the heavy thud of his tread on the stairs as he carries her—still struggling and protesting—up to the second floor, and then, a moment later, the sound of a door slamming.
“About time,” Bobby mutters next to Sam, finally picking up the remote and turning off the TV. “I think my brain just melted outta my ears. Shoot your eye out, my ass.”
Biting his lip, Sam shifts on the couch and cranes his neck around to glance back at the stairs. “Should we leave?” he checks.
But Bobby just shakes his head and settles back against the couch with a sigh, closing his eyes and tipping his cap down over his face. “Naw. Just given ‘em a few minutes. They’ll sort it out.”
Sam isn’t so sure of that, but it turns out Bobby’s right as usual, because less than half an hour later, the unseen door opens again. Erica looks a little embarrassed as she follows Dean downstairs, but then Dean pauses in the front hall to hook his arm around her shoulders and the embarrassment smoothes out.
Sam watches his brother turn his head, lips moving close and intimate beside Erica’s ear, and for the first time there’s no accompanying stab of resentment or jealousy. Erica actually laughs at whatever Dean is saying, getting a hand up and pushing at his stomach. Grinning, Dean lets himself be moved back a step and then follows close behind Erica as she comes over to stand by the couch and ask, with a shaky smile, “So, you boys up for some Grand Theft Auto?”
Sam raises an eyebrow—more at the fact that Erica actually seems to be trying than at the proposed distraction. Five minutes later, though, when he’s watching Dean’s thumbs mash down the buttons on the remote, he has to admit that the whole thing feels pretty surreal. It always hits Sam like this, when he’s least expecting it: how normal his brother’s life has become.
Dean used to hotwire cars when they needed an extra ride, now he’s playing at it for kicks. The path from point A to point B just doesn’t seem to line up easily in Sam’s head.
Dean’s just as good at this play version of the activity as he was at the real thing, of course—he’s always been almost eerily talented when it comes to anything involving hand-eye coordination. And he’s just as obnoxious as ever when he wins, too.
During Dean’s second impromptu victory dance in front of the TV, Sam actually finds himself exchanging a glance with Erica—an unexpected moment of shared, fond exasperation. Erica quickly looks away, lips pursing, but it’s still more than Sam has ever gotten out of her before. He wonders what Dean said to her upstairs.
Whatever it was, most of the high-strung emotions that were filling her earlier today seem to have settled now. If she doesn’t look precisely happy with the situation—with Sam’s presence—then for the first time, she seems resigned to it. When it comes time to open presents, she actually hands Sam his with something approaching a smile. The expression looks a little strained, true, but Sam will take what he can get.
“Thanks,” he says, surprised she bothered to buy him anything.
“It isn’t much,” she warns, hugging her stomach as she returns to curl up in Dean’s lap where he’s sprawled with his legs hanging over the side of his armchair. The arm Dean slings around her waist is casual and easy and Sam quickly looks away.
Okay, maybe he isn’t quite as okay with the whole Dean and Erica thing as he thought.
Erica’s gift turns out to be a bright red and green scarf, which she apparently knit for him herself, and which makes his own offering—a Best of John Coltridge CD (Dean’s suggestion)—seem paltry in comparison. But Erica seems pleased enough with the present, and her, “No candle this time?” almost feels like a friendly joke.
Sam watches with interest as Bobby opens his own gift from Dean and Erica—Dean refused to tell Sam what they were getting the man. It’s reassuring to see the familiar lines of a pistol when Bobby lifts his gift from the box: a reminder that their old life was real and not just some dark fever dream. Bobby handles the gun reverently, rubbing his thumb over the pearl-embossed grip and beaming like a kid with a shiny new toy.
Dean opens Bobby’s gift next—an incomprehensible tumble of bulbs and seeds, as far as Sam can tell, but Dean seems thrilled. He spends a while poking through the box and double-checking the identity of some seeds with Bobby, and then, finally sets everything aside and glances at the tree. There’s one package left beneath the boughs, and Sam’s insides squirm uncomfortably at the thought of having to open it.
“I’ll go get yours,” he says before Dean can suggest anything else. “You gotta close your eyes, okay? It’s not wrapped.”
“What, couldn’t figure out how to work a tape dispenser?” Dean teases.
Sam gives his brother the finger and then pushes to his feet and heads for the front hall. He hesitates by the closet, still undecided about the all important package in his coat pocket, and then bypasses that door for the front one, jogging down the path and over to Bobby’s car. His breath fogs out into the air as he pushes the flannel blanket on the floor and takes Dean’s gift out, holding it gingerly by the neck.
Sam isn’t outside for long, but by the time he gets back inside, his face and hands are stinging with the cold. His heart is pumping fast, though—adrenaline—and it won’t be long before he’s warm again. After taking a moment to glance at the closet door once more, Sam gives his head a slight shake and gets moving.
He isn’t ready to hand over that particular gift. Not yet.
He forces a smile on his face as he strides back into the living room, trying to hide his nerves, and then comes to an abrupt halt.
Dean is right where Sam left him, hands resting lightly on his thighs and eyes shut. Bobby and Erica are missing, though, and something about the stiff way Dean is sitting tells Sam that their absence isn’t accidental—that Dean asked them to disappear for a couple minutes. Sam’s gift isn’t under the tree anymore, but waiting for him on the coffee table.
Suddenly, Sam’s heart is beating faster than ever, deafeningly loud.
He’s pretty sure that’s what Dean hears when his brother tilts his head blindly toward the front hall and calls, “That you, Sammy?”
“Yeah,” Sam makes himself answer. Another bit of concentrated effort brings his left foot forward, and then his right. He swallows, trying to work some moisture back into his dry mouth, and then asks, “Where is everyone?”
“The washer’s been acting up the last few weeks. Bobby’s taking a look.”
“And Erica?”
“Erica’s making sure a look is all Bobby’s taking—she doesn’t want water all over the basement floor.”
“Ah,” Sam says, carefully not pointing out all the holes in that particular story—starting with the fact that Dean is more than capable of fixing mechanical problems himself, and ending with how implausible the timing is.
This is one lie Sam is more than willing to let slide, because as much as an audience might help diffuse some of the tension running through him, he prefers this. He’s been craving this all day, actually. Just the two of them, just him and Dean.
The way it used to be.
“Hold out your hands,” he says, coming to stand in front of his brother.
“You better not be about to dump a cooler of snow in my lap,” Dean says as he complies.
Sam’s too nervous to laugh at the joke, voice trapped in his throat as he gently places his gift in his brother’s hands.
Dean grunts at the unexpected heft and size of it, and a moment later—as the feel of polished wood registers—he sucks in a breath. His eyes open, immediately fastening on the battered shape of the guitar in his lap. He shifts his grip on the instrument, holding the neck with one hand and the body with the other. There aren’t any strings on the guitar at present, but Dean is running his fingers over the place where they should be, following the tune of some unheard music in his head.
“It’s not the prettiest, I know, but the guy at the store played it for me, and it sounds fine,” Sam says. “And anyway, I thought—”
“I know what you thought,” Dean interrupts, voice not exactly unfriendly but holding enough of a warning that Sam immediately shuts his mouth. He can’t stop looking back and forth from the guitar to his brother, though, and the instrument looks as right in Dean’s arms as he knew it would when he first saw it.
Both are worn; both are battered around the edges. And both are more than capable of shining with nothing more than a few new strings and some polish.
From the tension in Dean’s body, the message is coming through loud and clear.
Sam clears his throat, pulling a flat package out of his back pocket and holding it out. “I, uh, also got you lessons. Mac Harrelson plays, and he said he’d show you how to put these on, tune it up and stuff.”
But Dean still won’t look at him. Instead, his eyes are locked on the guitar as he traces over its worn surface with his hands.
“I didn’t think you remembered,” he says softly, after Sam has finally given up waiting on him and put the strings down on the edge of the coffee table.
“Yeah, well, I do.”
They were only in Clearview, Idaho, for a few months—just long enough for Sam to get used to the routine of waiting for his brother by the back door of the high school band room. He had to wait there because Dean—newly a junior and less than half a year from dropping out—spent forever fooling around inside before he’d walk Sam home. First it was Dolly Beckerson, the second saxophone in CHS’ jazz band, claiming his attention, and then, after Dolly caught him making out with Pam Shields behind the gym, Gabe and Tony Reyers.
Sam still isn’t quite sure how his brother ever connected with those two—both honors students and already bound for one Ivy League school or another—but something about the combination worked well enough for Dean to spend half his afternoon hanging out with them while messing around on one of the school Gibsons.
And Sam isn’t ever going to forget the day Dean stopped spending so much time there—the day that spooked his brother so badly that Dean avoided that entire end of the building until they picked up and moved again two weeks later. He remembers listening to his brother’s halting attempts to pick out Stairway to Heaven on the Gibson—remembers the notes coming to a jarring, surprised halt when the band director unexpectedly stepped out from his office.
“How long have you been playing?” Sam heard the man ask, and it wasn’t Dean who answered, but one of the Reyers’ brothers—Tony, maybe. Tony who said this was Dean’s fourth time picking on the strings.
“Your fingering’s a little clumsy, but you’ve got strong hands and an instinctual feel for the instrument,” the band director replied. “Why don’t you switch into Introduction to Guitar? We’re always looking for new talent.”
Dean did say something then—too low for Sam to catch—but Sam read Dean’s abrupt departure from the room clearly enough.
Back then, it was just another thing to be pissed at Dad about—Dean shutting down on something Sam could tell he enjoyed just because it had the potential to take his attention away from hunting. Away from what he saw as his God-given duty to Dad’s crusade. Over the years, Sam has come to understand that Dad’s approval isn’t the main thing Dean was worried about, but it doesn’t make the memory sting any less.
“You didn’t have to stop just because you were getting noticed, Dean,” he says now, sitting on the edge of the coffee table and trying to catch his brother’s eye.
“Sure I did,” Dean answers. “We were supposed to be flying under the radar, not drawing attention from do-good assholes who could call CPS on Dad. It wasn’t safe, you know that.”
Sam does, but that doesn’t mean he has to like it. Still, it isn’t the conversation he wants to have—this isn’t about the unchangeable past, but the tenuous present—so he lets it go and points out, “It’s a Telecaster. Just like Jimmy Page.”
“Maybe even the same year,” Dean jokes, thumbing one of the deeper gouges marring the body.
Sam starts to stiffen—underlying message or not, he’s a little self-conscious about the fact that he couldn’t afford to get the new instrument his brother deserves—but the humor glinting out from Dean’s eyes as he finally looks up soothes the sting of embarrassment almost immediately.
“So,” Dean says, smiling as he glances back down at the guitar in his hands. “Some of my lessons in Classic Rock 101 stuck after all.”
“What can I say? After the hundredth time you hear something, it gets kind of hard to shut it out.”
Dean snorts, but the noise has a soft, fond feel to it, and the second look he gives Sam isn’t anything but warm and appreciative. “Thanks, Sammy,” he says.
There’s a little too much weight to the words for Dean to mean just the guitar, and some of the tension in Sam’s chest eases as he sees that his brother gets it—that Dean understands everything Sam needs the guitar to say so that he doesn’t have to.
There are some things that Sam’s pretty sure he can’t ever put into words, and the way he feels about Dean—about what Dean has built for himself here—is one of them.
The shared moment draws out a shade too long—long enough for the air in the room to heat and charge—and in the end, it’s Dean who looks away first, clearing his throat and jerking his chin at the package on the coffee table.
“Go on,” he says, carefully not looking at Sam. “Open yours.”
He seems anxious suddenly, and Sam’s own nerves jump in response to his brother’s as he moves to sit back down on the couch and picks up the package. There’s a book inside—he can tell that much just by handling the gift. What he can’t figure out is why Dean is acting the way he is, breath coming fast and light as he clutches the guitar close, half-hiding his face behind the instrument’s neck.
Heart hammering, Sam peels back a strip of brightly colored paper and then stills. Dean didn’t. He can’t have.
Except when Sam can get himself moving again, he sees that Dean did.
There are two books actually, both oversized paperbacks with bold lettering across the covers. On top is an LSAT prep book. Below that is a second study guide devoted to the GREs. Sam balances them in his lap and tries desperately to follow whatever convoluted thought process led his brother to buy these.
From his armchair, Dean says, “I, uh, wasn’t sure. If you still wanted to do the law thing. But I told the chick at the bookstore you were, like, some kind of genius or something, and she said you’d probably want to go to some kind of grad school when you finish undergrad.”
“Dean,” Sam chokes out as his vision blurs. His own gift seems stupid suddenly, insignificant next to what Dean is offering.
“I called Stanford,” Dean continues, his voice too loud and falsely cheerful. “They said you could transfer credits. If, y’know, you wanted to take a few more courses at Dakota State. I mean, I know it’s not exactly top of the line, but, uh, they don’t enroll until spring, so you’ve got time to make up your mind.”
“Dean,” Sam starts, and then has to pause to clear his throat before haltingly continuing, “I can’t—I can’t afford this.”
“It’s free. Kinda. I mean, you got a scholarship.”
From somewhere outside his shell-shocked bubble, Sam hears his brother put the guitar down and stand up. There’s a crinkle of paper and then Dean is standing next to him and thrusting a handful of papers into Sam’s field of vision. Sam can’t make out much of the writing with his eyes watering as badly as they are, but he knows a college acceptance letter when he sees one.
“What—how—when—”
“Bobby helped,” Dean says, sounding a little embarrassed by the admission. “I couldn’t figure out what they were asking on some of the questions. And, uh, I may have had Erica hack into Stanford’s system to get hold of your original application letter. All I could come up with was ‘Emo nerd seeks same.’”
He falls silent, obviously waiting for a response, but Sam can’t—he just can’t process this right now. He’s too staggered by what it means. Too stunned by the depth of faith Dean is showing—faith that Sam means what he says when he promises to stay. Faith that Sam is in this for the long haul. Faith that he isn’t leaving this time.
Faith in them.
“Dude, say something.”
Sam’s body unlocks at the unveiled nerves in Dean’s voice, shooting him up to grab his brother and pull him into a tight hug. The books tumble to the ground at their feet, and the covers are probably getting bent all to hell, but Sam doesn’t care. He’s too busy pressing his flushed cheek to his brother’s, one hand tangling in Dean’s hair and holding fast. He’s fisting Dean’s shirt with the other, knuckles pressed between Dean’s shoulder blades and forcing their chests together tightly enough that he can feel his brother’s heartbeat pounding out a rapid counterpoint to his own.
Dean is resistant and stiff for all of a second and then his arms come up and grip back. He tilts his head slightly where it’s resting against Sam’s, laying his forehead along Sam’s temple and exhaling a shaky breath over Sam’s cheekbone.
“Thank you,” Sam breathes, and he means, I love you. He means, I promise.
When Dean’s lips brush his jaw lightly, Sam thinks they might be tipped up in a smile.
“Guess some things never change,” Dean says. “Should’ve gotten you a Barbie, you fucking girl.”
Sam laughs and holds on tighter.