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Benny hadn’t requested this, but he’d said a quick prayer as he opened the convention paperwork. From the second his best friend had told him he wasn’t coming but his brother still was, Benny had hoped that Sam would be participating in the random roommate assignment part of the convention. He was sure that something had gone horribly wrong at some point, because the stories he’d heard from Dean and the angry person he’d met when he and Sam ran into each other, Benny had trouble reconciling. If they were roommates at the convention, there was no way Sam could avoid him forever, and he’d get the chance to try to figure out what went wrong and correct it.
Benny got to the room they were sharing first. Despite Dean’s threatening jokes, Benny was relieved to see that there were, in fact, two beds in the room. Dean might be shipping them, but pulling an “oops only one bed” seemed like a bad way to get him and Sam past whatever the problem was. While he waited for Sam to arrive, Benny unpacked his laptop and claimed a corner of the couch near an outlet. He wanted to go over his schedule for the next few days and make sure he was hitting all of the sessions he wanted while making sure to schedule time to walk through galleries and, of course, check out the vendors. Never knew what fun new toy would be advertised at these things.
First, though, he had some editing to finish up. He’d hoped to be able to do it on the flight up from New Orleans, but it was a nude shoot and he’d been seated next to a twelve-year-old who was constantly staring at his screen as he tried to read emails and demanding he play a game or do something interesting or give him the laptop so he wouldn’t be bored. No way was Benny opening up those pictures.
He had just about finished the third picture when the door opened, and Sam walked in. “Seven billion people in the world and I got put in a room with you. Either I’m cursed or God likes playing house with us.”
“Aw, come on, it ain’t that bad, is it?” Benny asked, closing his laptop. “It’s good to see you, Sam. Anything I can do to help you get settled?”
Sam glared at him suspiciously. “Why would you care? I’m not buying Dean’s excuse about Emma being sick. In the time between he told me he wasn’t coming and me getting on the plane, she’s had measles, chicken pox, the flu, and symptoms of Ebola. Either she’s the unluckiest girl alive, or you and Dean are scheming something.”
That explained the suspicion. “Couldn’t say, but I didn’t have anything to do with the scheming. Although when Dean called to tell me he wasn’t coming, he said Emma had cholera. Shoulda known he was lying to me, who gets cholera anymore?”
“Ugh, stupid Dean.” Sam tossed his duffle bag on one of the beds and then collapsed on the opposite corner of the couch from Benny. “If I haven’t moved by the time you’re looking to go to bed and you want that one, just throw it over, there’s nothing fragile in it.”
“Rough flight?” Benny guessed. Then he realized something odd. “Where’s your camera?”
Sam groaned and slid down, letting his head rest on the back of the couch as his long legs pushed the table away from them. “It got to go for an extra couple rides with the cab driver from the airport. According to him, he didn’t realize the bag was still in there when he closed the door and drove off after I’d grabbed my duffle out of the trunk, but I’m skeptical. He’ll be dropping it off at the front desk when he finishes his current fare, but it’s out of town and he won’t be able to get here for a couple hours.”
Benny could not imagine going through that. His unproductive flight now seemed like a dream. “That sucks, man. I’m so sorry. You wanna wait at the desk for him, I’ll help you hide the body and swear to the police that you were up here asleep the whole time.”
“You even care?” Sam turned to stare at Benny in open-mouthed shock. “I’m not gonna hurt the guy. Perfectly happy to just get my bag back, really. I’m too exhausted to care about anything else. Figured I’d sleep on the plane, but I kind of forgot how uncomfortable they are when you’re 6’4”. Even as tired as I was from having stayed up the last two days getting work done, I couldn’t sleep.”
“Take a nap,” Benny said. “I’ll wake you up when they call that your bag’s here.”
He hadn’t meant quite so immediately, as he reopened his laptop to get back to work, but next thing he knew, he didn’t have a lap to put his laptop on. Sam had fallen asleep, and as he did, he fell over so his head landed in Benny’s lap. It wasn’t the most comfortable way to work, with the laptop perched on the arm of the couch and him twisted to use it, but if Sam was getting the sleep he needed so badly, it was a sacrifice Benny was happy to make.
When the phone rang to say that the driver was five minutes away, Benny briefly considered letting Sam sleep and handling it himself. He thought better of it and gently shook Sam’s shoulder. “Hey, man, your bag’s almost here, and if that driver’s got any sense at all he ain’t handing it over to me. Besides, you probably ought to go through it to make sure he didn’t ‘accidentally’ lose something from it.”
“Ugh, you’re… wait.” Sam shot upright. “The hell? You should’ve made me move, Benny, that can’t have been comfortable!”
“It wasn’t, but I didn’t mind, you needed the sleep and you weren’t hurting anything.” Benny got to his feet to stretch out. “Want me to come with you, just in case, or stay up here?”
“Come with me,” Sam decided. “Do your best Dean Winchester at the guy.”
Luckily for the driver, everything was in the bag in the condition Sam remembered it being in when he left. Sam was in a much better mood when they got back up to the room, so Benny decided to press his luck. “Sam? Can I ask you something?”
“Yeah, I guess I owe you one, what do you need?”
“It’s not a favor, it’s a question. Why do you hate me so much?” Maybe it was a favor, too, but it was more curiosity. If Sam told him to fuck off or gave him a flippant answer, he’d let it go.
Sam didn’t blow off the question, instead sitting on the edge of his bed with his elbows braced on this thighs. “Look, it’s not… this may take a while to explain. So give me a minute if I seem to stall out, okay? It’s not gonna be easy to talk about.”
“Fair enough, take your time,” Benny promised.
Sam nodded, and Benny waited while he found where to begin. “Me and Dean… I know he’s told you stories, you know that growing up it was just the two of us and a dad who was so paranoid about everything that we never lived in the same town long enough to really make friends. It was harder on me than on Dean in the obvious ways, but it sure wasn’t easy on him, either. I never had the gift Dean did for making superficial friends easily, but that also means I never got to the point where I felt lonely when no one around me thought I had any reason to. For all his superficial friends, I was the only real relationship he had.” He paused for a moment. “Not that kind of relationship, despite what a lot of people think. You know what I mean.”
“I know. You two are all tangled up in all kinds of ways, but not like that.”
“So when I met Amelia Ruby and we started falling in love, Dean didn’t take it well.” Benny left out a soft snort. He’d heard some things from Dean that he didn’t believe about the veterinarian his little brother had shacked up with for a year. Things like how she was a demon in disguise corrupting his little brother to drag him to Lucifer. “He thought Amy was stealing me from him, and we fought about it, and I said some horrible things that drove him away. He took off, and you know his side of the next year because you were there for it. Not sure why you weren’t there when I called to tell him that Amy’s ex-husband had shown up out of the grave the Army had told her he was in, but it doesn’t matter. Dean was willing to let me come back home, but he never let up on how I’d betrayed him for a girl. It’s not Amy’s fault that Don wasn’t dead, but he wouldn’t shut up about running her down and running me down too.”
Benny wanted so badly to get up and hug Sam, but interruptions were the last thing Sam needed right now. Instead, he just waited. “I hadn’t heard a single word about you until Dean snuck off in the middle of the night to meet up with you to help you out with that thing with your ex. I… may have jumped to conclusions when I saw the two of you together,” Sam forced out, head hanging. “I thought you two were together. Dean set me straight on that aspect, but in some ways, that made things a little worse? I was embarrassed about the conclusions, sure, but even before I started falling in love with Amy, Dean was acting like a dick because me having a friend who wasn’t his friend first was apparently the end of the world. Now here he is with a friend he cares about enough to drop everything to run to help that I don’t even know he has? The only time I kept Amy a secret from him was when I snuck out to go talk to her about some of the accusations from Dean, and Dean came after me and literally sucker-punched me so hard I went to the ground. When he and Cas first started hanging out the only problem I had with it was that Cas’s brother literally wanted me dead and it took a while before I was convinced that he didn’t.”
“Ouch.” Benny could understand where Sam was coming from, now.
“Yeah. So… not anything personal in hating you, you really don’t deserve any of the shit I’ve put you through, and I am very sorry about that. Me and Dean have hashed things out a little better now, thanks to an old friend getting sick of our shit, but I was so embarrassed about how rude I’ve been to you that it seemed easier to avoid you than to deal with you. Which, again, you don’t deserve. I’m sorry.”
This time, Benny did get up to give Sam a hug. “A lot of the stories Dean told me about you, I took with a few grains of salt. I knew he was mad at you over Amelia, and I don’t know exactly when the call came in, but he eventually came around and realized he needed you. He didn’t think you’d understand about me, not with Cas dead and him being such an ass about Amelia, so he asked me not to contact him unless it was an emergency until he called me. When we talked after the mess with Desmond and Elizabeth, he admitted he was probably never gonna call me, because he didn’t think you’d understand.”
“I don’t understand why he gets to have friends and I don’t. I really don’t.”
Benny squeezed his eyes closed. “I don’t either, chief. Seems to me like Dean doesn’t know how to let go. He wants us to be friends, even suggested hooking the two of us up…”
“Because then I have a boyfriend he’s still in control of?” Sam interrupted. “He used to do the same thing with Cas, tried to hook us up on any pretext he could think of, but it was never going to happen.”
“Exactly. Now, based on the stories I’ve heard, I do think we should be friends, and I would like to give bein’ together a try… but on our terms, not Dean’s. You don’t want even to be friends, I won’t push you anymore. Last thing I’d ever want is for you to feel like you don’t get that kind of choice.”
“Thank you.” Sam’s face twisted into a rueful smile. “Gotta admit part of the reason I’ve been so horrible about you is that under better circumstances, you did seem like the kind of guy I usually go for. Not right away, obviously, but if you’d been there when I came home after things with Amelia, it wouldn’t have surprised me one bit if we’d ended up together.” His smile smoothed out, becoming more genuine. “Probably a good idea to take things slow and let them develop, but if you’re interested, then I’m all for giving this a chance. Like hell am I gonna let my problems with Dean keep screwing shit up for me.”
“Glad to hear that,” Benny said. “You’re right about the taking it slow, for sure. I’m done with conference stuff tomorrow at around six, you wanna meet somewhere for dinner and start figuring out what that looks like?”
“Sounds good to me. Now, I just want to go to sleep. I’m still exhausted, despite the nap.” Sam got up and headed for the bathroom. When he came back out, he flopped on his bed, and then picked his head up to look at Benny. “I know what we just said about taking it slow, but cuddles are always welcome, if you want. You just look like a cuddly type of guy.”