Work Text:
You’re going to die.
You’re my big brother. You make jokes and you lie and you overcompensate and you love our father more than he ever loved you. You’re going to die because I am going to live and we only have a year. A year. Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it? An abstract measurement of time. A year. Twelve months. Fifty-two weeks. A lifetime isn’t enough and they only gave you a year.
We exchange gifts and they’re so inexpensive but we know each other so well. You give me porn, I give you motor oil and we know each other so well. You know I like porn more than I say and I know the only thing you care about in this universe more than me is your car. Tomorrow if I were to crawl inside your skin and pretend to be you, I think I’d do a bang up job. I spent my whole life watching you, wanting to be like you, wanting to be you. I don’t know when it turned into me wanting you.
It’s Christmas and the room smells like pine. I know we remember our similar childhoods in two very different ways because where I see a cage and imprisonment and a destiny I never asked for, you see as inevitable. I wonder what you might’ve been like if we’d been normal. I think you would’ve started a garage band with your friends and illegal beers snuck from the fridge upstairs . You’d look good behind a drum set. Sweat making your hair cling to your forehead, fingers curled tightly around two drumsticks, your biceps flexing and curling when you lifted up your arms, I think you’d look great. I think you would’ve been a mechanic maybe, something with your hands. Grease on your cheekbone. Dirty wrench in your back pocket. I think we would’ve been far apart. Strangers. I don’t know how that makes me feel.
A year.
Christmas, pine, gifts and I call out your name. Hey, Dean. You hear that hitch in my breath. You look at me in that fucking way with that fucking look on your fucking face and I forget what I’m saying. It’s been that way since I was twelve and it’s good to see that not everything has changed. You’re still all-consuming and electric and the sun in my solar system with your own gravity and everything in my life would fall apart without you. Planets would collapse, asteroids would collide and you only have a year left.
I’m scared. I’m scared for you, I’m scared of you, everything is threatening to burst at the seams and I’m being held together by pins and needles. All it takes it for one to snap and I’m done. My pin, my needle, my sun with your orbit and hey, Dean, do you feel the same way about me? Hey, Dean, do you ever think about crossing the line with me?
You’ve been protecting me all your life. Shielding me, training me, watching me from afar. You never taught me to tie my shoelaces because you wanted to be the one to always do it. Till I was twelve, I think. I can’t be sure when I started feeling weird about it, you crouching before me, fingers deftly lacing my shoes and I remember thinking that I know how to shoot a gun and tourniquet a leg and pull out a fucking tooth but I can’t tie my shoes. I’m sorry I pushed you away then. You can tie my shoes now if you want.
A year, two years, an eternity. I’ll always ask for more because I’m greedy like that.
Hey, Dean, if I took a stab in the dark and told you how I felt, would you say yes or would you look at me with that fucking look on your fucking face? There has to be something I could do. If this was me, you wouldn’t eat or sleep or breathe until you got me out of this. It’s funny how you’re the closest thing I’ve got to a mother, a father, a friend, a lover and it’s funny how you only understand the value of things once they’re jeopardized. Gone. Grains of sand slipping through your fingers.
That time at Stanford. I would give up on you but you would never give up on me. I knew you were only a call away. I had your number memorized. I would recite it to myself in the shower sometimes just to check if it still had a heartbeat in my neural pathways. If my mouth still remembered the shape of your name. Dean, Dean, hey, Dean. I love you in the way a little brother shouldn’t love their big brother.
I don’t know what it’s going to be like when you’re gone. I think about you all the time. I see you everywhere, my dreams, my nightmares, everywhere in the grocery store. In the cucumbers, in the pre-made sandwiches, in the processed pies near the conveyor belt, packed full of preservatives and hey, Dean, is it scaring you? Are you scared? I know you’re scared. Are you going to miss me? I hope to fucking God that you’re going to miss me.
Hey, Dean and your eyes flash green. Splinters of hope in your pupils. You think I might say it, you think I might be the one to cross that line. This moment makes my heart race because I’m considering it — I’m really considering saying it because fuck it, you only have a year left, right? But if I say it and you say it and the sky lights up with thunder outside, what will change? You’ll still only have a year and I’ll still only have a year before my planets collapse and my asteroids collide into eventual ruin.
I’m scared. Hey, Dean. I ask you if you want to see the game and you smile. Fucking cowards, that’s what we are, fucking cowards. You say yes and slump back into the couch. The proof of my love resting against your sternum. It’s snowing outside and you’ve got a year left.
Hey, Dean, I say. We’re not really paying attention to the game. What if I gave you a cheese wheel for next Christmas? There’s not going to be a next Christmas for neither you nor me. You smile, soft and crinkly around the edges from the eggnog and you say sure, Sammy.
I think I’ve never loved anything the way I’ve loved you.
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