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Dean knows he must look bad if his dad is coming around the passenger side to help him out. He wishes he wouldn’t. He’s practically sending a flare up, letting every overconcerned little brother in eyeshot of the driveway know there’s an excuse to pitch a fit up for grabs. The front door rattles on its hinges and Sam is flying down the front steps before Dean is even halfway out of the car.
Sam storms across the yellowed lawn to meet them, all teenage rage and clenched fists cutting through the dark. He stops short on the opposite side of the open door. “What the hell happened?”
John rights Dean on his feet and shoots over his shoulder, “Get back inside, Sam.”
Bad moves from both ends, Dean thinks. Fighting words. One of these days he’ll stop letting that surprise him.
“It isn’t a full moon,” Sam says.
John shuts the door. “Inside, Sam.”
Sam closes in on them the moment the wall’s down. John corrals him back, stepping between him and Dean.
“He’s alright,” John says. “Right, Dean?”
Dean glances at John. He’s looking at Sam.
“I’m alright, Sammy,” Dean says. “Looks worse than it is.”
“It looks pretty fucking bad,” Sam says.
Dean hasn’t gotten a good look at himself, but from the sidelong glances John gave him in the car and the glimpses he caught of himself in the side mirror and the stinging pain streaking along his face in jagged lightning-lines, he’s sure Sam isn’t wrong. It still isn’t as bad as it looks—he hit his head and got his face sliced up. Surface shit. The skinned knees of hunting. It’s the fact he got hurt at all on what was supposed to be a simple job that’s making Dean shove shame down by the barrelful and Sam flare up like he came home half-dead.
“What happened?” Sam repeats.
Dean looks to John again. He meets his gaze this time. He’s got his own question on his face: we telling him? Dean shakes his head, though he’s acting on instinct over any real reason—or realistic expectation—to keep it from Sam. He’ll probably tell him all about it later, when his head stops pounding long enough to bend the story into a more badass-sounding shape. If he doesn’t, Sam’ll pry it out of him anyway. The hell is Dad asking Dean for?
Sam reaches for Dean. John doesn’t block him again, instead circling back to the trunk to grab their gear. Sam tries to hitch Dean’s arm over his shoulder and Dean swats him off. “Told you I’m fine, Sammy, c’mon.”
Sam balls his fists up by his sides. Dean shoulders past him to head up to the house. He is walking fine, it’s just his head, and even then it’s really just his face. And he was kinda dizzy when they first hit the road, but that’s all simmered down now.
Sam, on the other hand, is simmering hard enough for Dean to feel the heat on the back of his neck as he follows him up the stoop and into the house. They’ve been rooted to this rickety old rambler on the edge of Kirtland for the last month while John tracked down the thing eating people’s hearts out all across northeastern Ohio. The place has been abandoned for at least a decade and it’s keen on letting them remember it whenever their footfalls hit too heavy for its liking. Dean braces himself for the front door to blow down every time somebody bothers it on its worn-down hinges. For now it keeps itself together when they pass through, even after Sam slams it shut and sends it rattling unhappily against its frame.
“This is bullshit,” Sam hisses.
Dean collapses onto the couch, realizing too late that he should’ve done a little more to make it look less like collapsing. “It’s no big deal,” he says.
“Like hell it isn’t.”
Sam marches over to him and angles Dean’s face up. He turns it between his hands, careful around the claw marks zigzagging across his face, but it’s not much use—there’s hardly an inch of skin that didn’t get torn up, and it’s tender even where it hasn’t been sliced to shit. Dean does his best not to wince, and that isn’t much use, either.
“Tell me what happened,” Sam says.
Dean shrugs. “Werewolves, man,” he says lamely. He doesn’t have a cool version of it mapped out yet, or one that at least doesn’t make him look like a dumbass rookie. “You know how they are.”
“Dean.”
“I screwed up, alright? I thought the thing was—”
“That’s not what I’m asking!”
Dean looks at him. He can’t figure out what else there is to ask.
“You’re ripped to shreds and Dad doesn’t have a scratch on him,” Sam says. “How the hell does that happen?”
Dean shifts out of his hands. “Dad’s a pro, that’s how,” he says. “I took a hit. It’s fine.”
“This isn’t a fucking slap in the face, Dean, you got mauled.”
“Yeah, you know, thanks, I didn’t realize—”
“The full moon was three days ago,” Sam says. “He would’ve been human.”
Dean tilts his head. “I mean, they’re never really…”
“You know what I mean. It’s not like you were getting chased through the woods. The guy lived in a friggin’ condo.”
Dean grimaces. This is why they shouldn’t be telling him this crap, he’s too goddamn smart, he knows what happened practically before they do.
“Dad was right there, wasn’t he?” Sam asks. “What’d he do, sit back and watch?”
The front door rattles open. Dean thinks, good, Dad’s here, he’ll save this, then runs the state of the room back over and asks himself, where the hell do I think I am.
John drops his bag on the table by the door. “Sam,” he says, “go to your room.”
Sam turns away from Dean. “Are you kidding me?”
“Don’t start,” John says—rookie fucking mistake, what is he thinking, that’s a two-word fast track to some serious starting. He opens up the bag and pulls out the suture kit, Jesus, is he serious? The cuts are nowhere near that deep. Most of them, anyway. “Your brother’s hurt.”
No, he isn’t serious. It’s an excuse, and a pretty alright one by their standards, to get Sam out of here for the debrief. John’s gotta straighten Dean out and make sure he doesn’t screw up like that again when there’s higher stakes than his head on the table. Dean’s more than happy to roll with it, except Sam caught on before he did and he’s already fuming hard enough to blow steam out his ears. Too fucking smart. They’re gonna need some new material.
“No, you’re not keeping me out of this,” Sam says. He stalks over to John and Dean tries to sink into the couch. “I’m not gonna sit around waiting for you two to come up with a cover story.”
“The hell are you talking about?”
“It’s a fucking werewolf! You shoot it! The moon isn’t even right, how’d it manage to—”
“That’s right, I forgot you’re the expert here.” John drops the suture kit and faces Sam. They’re almost the same height these days. Dean’s stomach turns. “How about you go ahead and handle it next time?”
“Maybe I should, if this is how he’s coming home.”
“Guys,” Dean tries, just to say he did.
“He can take it,” John says. Dean shuts his eyes and goes back to sinking.
“Did you send him in by himself?” Sam asks.
“Are you nuts?”
Dean has half a mind to feel slighted, instinctively jumping to his own defense: Come on, I’m twenty, not twelve. A gig like this is nothing to me.
Except, evidently, it isn’t nothing. If the way he majorly fucked himself is anything to go by, it is pretty severely something. He might, in fact, be twelve.
“So you were with him,” Sam says, “and you just sat back and let it happen?”
“People get hurt, Sam,” Dad says tightly. “That’s the job.”
“Fuck you, that’s the job—”
John hits him. He must, ‘cause Dean hears it, but when his eyes snap open and he sits up straight he finds Sam standing steady and even like nothing happened at all. His back is to Dean. Maybe he imagined it.
“Your room, Sam,” John says, lowering his hand to his side.
Sam doesn’t budge.
“Sam,” John warns.
“Sam,” Dean attempts, “I’m fine, seriously, just—”
Dean’s looking right at them this time, but he still thinks he could be imagining it when Sam rushes forward and—and what the fuck does he think he’s gonna do, exactly? Dean doesn’t get an answer to that. John puts an arm up to ward him off and Sam grabs at it like he’s gonna do something really, really fucking stupid. He’s already doing something stupid. He’s an idiot.
John pushes him back and they briefly, mercifully, leave Dean’s line of sight, scuffling behind the couch like a couple of girls having a slapfight. There’s a slam against the backrest and Dean turns reflexively—someone’s getting hurt, do something about it. Wishes he didn’t. There’s no something to be done when one of them gets like this, nevermind the both of them.
John has Sam shoved up against the couch, looming over him with one hand caught in the front of his shirt and the other wrapped tight around his wrists. He’s too close for Sam to go anywhere but back, his waist bent over the backrest at an awkward angle that leaves him dangling halfway from John’s hands. John’s eyes are hard on Sam, brimming with a familiar crossbreed of guilt and rage, and Sam meets them with a dead-set defiance that makes Dean nauseous.
Dean shrinks back, but they’re still right there. Sam doesn’t slip out of John’s hold, or try to. His nose is bleeding—John couldn’t have hit him that hard—but he did, has to have, ‘cause the blood is trickling down to Sam’s mouth, where it’s curved into a nasty smile.
Dean’s head swims—pounds—he shuts his eyes and turns his face away.
“The fuck are you smiling about, boy.”
Sam says nothing.
“You wipe that grin off your face if you know what’s good for you.”
A long moment passes. There’s another quick thud by Dean’s head and the back of the couch shakes. He guesses Sam didn’t know what was good for him. Sam never knows what’s good for him, never, and he proves it again—he cackles. Crazed and ugly.
“Go ahead, Dad,” Sam says. “I can take it.”
Dean keeps his eyes squeezed shut and tries to imagine something else. He can’t manage anything past the room. He keeps seeing Sam’s knobby knees knocking against John’s legs, his dad’s combat boots bracketing Sam’s socked feet. There’s a long and silent moment where that’s all he’s got and it keeps getting worse, uglier, until Sam’s weight drops. One of his hands brushes against the side of Dean’s head as he scrambles to catch his balance.
The floorboards creak under John’s footsteps thudding towards the front of the room. The door slams, again, and then it’s just the sound of Sam’s breathing and the hinges rattling and Dean’s blood rushing in his ears.
Dean’s room—air quotes around Dean’s for a thousand obvious reasons—is occupied by a lopsided nightstand, a halfheartedly populated dresser, and a full bed that he can’t even appreciate ‘cause he and Sam got stuck sharing. The mottled white quilt beneath Dean is only marginally less humiliating than the flowery paper peeling off the walls. It’d be funny that Sam got stuck in a chick’s room for the month if Dean wasn’t stuck right there with him, sleeping side-by-side every night on the same paisley sheets with the same long-gone-girl dust sinking into their skin. They’re way too old to be shacking up together like this—for another thousand reasons, worse ones, reasons that might not be obvious on the outside but that’ll get a hell of a lot clearer if Sam keeps pushing the way he has been—but the case wasn’t supposed to take long enough for that to really matter. The case wasn’t supposed to be a whole lot of things.
Dean’s face stings. The limp pillow under his head is smeared with skimpy bloodstreaks from trying to smother himself in it too many times before turning onto his back and giving up any illusions of sleep. He tied up what he could, but most of the cuts aren’t deep enough for stitches to be anything but overkill—he’s grisly enough without looking like Frankenstein. He won’t even get cool scars for his trouble. Nothing about any of it is cool.
The other side of the bed dips. Dean doesn’t move, keeps his face straight to the cracked ceiling.
“It’s not a full moon,” Sam says. It’s the first thing he’s said since John left.
“Nope,” Dean agrees.
“That was the whole point of going tonight,” Sam says. “So you wouldn’t have to deal with it wolfing out.”
“Yup.”
He doesn’t have to look to know he’s getting a severe bitchface thrown his way. The bed shifts as Sam turns onto his side to face Dean.
“Dad’s not coming back tonight,” Sam says.
“He’ll be back.”
“He won’t.”
“Hasn’t even been two hours.” Not that he’s counting.
“He still won’t.”
Dean resists the urge to look at him. “What do you care, anyway?” he asks. “Miss him that much?”
He’s glad he didn’t look. He can feel Sam’s eyes on him and he doesn’t wanna know what they’re up to.
“If I came home the way you did,” Sam says, as if Dean got rolled out on a stretcher and not with a couple ugly claw marks, “you’d kill him.”
“It’s not like he laid me out and carved me up himself, Sam.”
“What’s the difference?”
“It’s not his fault, that’s the difference.”
“In what world is it not his fault?”
It just isn’t, but Dean can’t say that. Sam will take it to prove something. Dean doesn’t say anything, and Sam will still use that to prove something, but at least Dean won’t have to hear it. He thinks he won’t have to see it, either, until Sam touches Dean’s face and turns it towards him and Dean doesn’t even think not to let him.
Sam’s nose isn’t bleeding anymore. It doesn’t look like he did anything to make that happen; the blood’s sitting there just the same as when it fell, only dried up, like he didn’t even bother.
Sam brushes a finger over a small spot on Dean’s jaw that hasn’t been split. From there he finds a path in Dean’s skin where he can trace between the breaks, from the ridge of his chin to the corner of his mouth and up to a thin sliver by his temple. He rests it there for a moment, then unfolds the rest of his fingers to splay over Dean’s cheek.
Dean squints at him. Sam presses his hand down. When Dean doesn’t react, Sam digs his thumb into a slit above Dean’s lip, a rough one that he probably should’ve stitched up now that he’s feeling how bad it can burn. Really gets the nail in there.
“Sam,” Dean manages.
“Don’t let me,” Sam says. “Okay? Just—don’t let me—”
Dean drags Sam’s hand away from his face. He holds Sam’s wrist between them on the bed and pretends to meet Sam’s eye by focusing really, really hard on the space between his brows.
Sam’s fingers twitch on the mattress. His other hand comes to cover Dean’s.
“I don’t wanna be like him,” Sam says quietly.
Dean doesn’t know what to say to that. You’re not? It makes him vaguely sick to think of spouting that off as a comfort. He gets what Sam means, but—no, there’s nothing to say to it.
He still has to come up with something. They can’t sit here in silence. If he tries for that, Sam’s just gonna keep coming up with shit to fill it, and he’s already on a steady downward trajectory toward the worst.
“You know, uh, cynanthropes—” Dean cuts himself off. This is so fucking stupid, he doesn’t want to explain this. “They don’t need a full moon to change,” he says anyway.
“Cynan…” Sam’s brow furrows. “You mean a weredog?”
No, he doesn’t mean a fucking weredog, he means the cooler-sounding thing that’ll make him look like slightly less of a pussy once he gets to the end of the story.
“Yeah,” Dean says. “Weredog.”
“Dad was sure it was a werewolf,” Sam says.
“Yeah, well.” Dean shrugs. “They’re basically the same thing.”
“Not really.”
Dean sighs. “No. Not really.”
Dean shifts uncomfortably. Sam’s still clutching his hand and Dean’s still holding onto Sam’s wrist. It’s way too sharing-and-caring already, like, absolutely no saving this from looking like a secret-keeping session between two girls at a sleepover. Might as well go full fairy at this point. He turns onto his side next to Sam, feeling stupider by the minute. Sam’s face is doing that sickly sympathetic thing, with the wide eyes and the concerned little crease to his brow, and it’s really not helping Dean feel any less gay. Maybe after they’re done here they’ll do each other’s makeup and work on developing matching fagcents.
“It, uh, transformed,” Dean says. “Obviously. Didn’t see that coming, so, I’m off my guard. But I get it together, you know. Distract it. We’re in the guy’s kitchen at this point, I end up—I don’t really know how, but I’m under the table with the thing, yeah? Dad’s ready to put it down. And it…uh.”
A flicker of guilt passes over Sam’s face. “You were too close?”
Dean should let him believe that. That was it, he got too tangled up with the thing, John couldn’t have taken the shot without killing them both. That’s a good explanation, something that happens all the time.
“No,” Dean says. “It’d have been fine, if he—I mean, it was still on me when he plugged it. No, he, uh…”
He tries to think of something else. Maybe John thought it bit him and had some sort of freakout. John was surprised by the thing, too. He just as easily might have been as thrown as Dean was. Or—cynanthropes, weredogs, they go in packs. Team players, not like werewolves. This guy lived alone, but who knows, could’ve been a neighborhood of ‘em. Something. And it’d be good to…know that. Keep the thing alive long enough to find out. Or to avoid sending a flare up for its friends without time to prepare.
But Sam would catch those lies in the air, or at least just think Dean was wrong. You shoot when the bastard’s clear, no questions asked, do not pass go, do not rack up the seconds ‘til your son’s face looks like the backend of a bad sewing job.
“It wasn’t even a minute,” Dean says. “Thing was vicious, I wasn’t getting out of that ready for the runway in any case.”
Sam shakes his head. “So Dad just…?”
He doesn’t get it. Why’s this the one thing he doesn’t get?
“He wanted me to take the shot,” Dean says. “I had my gun, I could’ve. I choked.”
It was cut and dry, the easiest thing, he’d have nailed the bitch in half a second if he’d wrapped his head around it ahead of time. He shouldn’t have been so rattled by it. They’re the exact same thing. Guy turns into a dog. Big whoop. It just looks different on a cynanthrope—they really go all the way. Hair, teeth, all-fours, the works.
The thing was counting on them getting its deal wrong, he thinks. John caught its scent because bodies were stacking up every month, once a month, with their hearts trashed and the rest ripped to shreds. All the attacks lined up with the lunar cycle. John pinned the guy with surveillance footage from—of all things—a vet’s office, where some doctor lady got torn up on the night of the full moon. A camera in the waiting room caught the guy creeping out with blood on his hands and a wild look in his eyes. With the target dead certain and its claws presumably sheathed for the next four weeks, there was no reason to hang back and wait another month to gun it down.
It was a clear-cut gig. Slip into the guy’s house, nail him through the heart, wipe their hands and call it a night. John wanted Dean to kill it himself from the jump, hone his skills on an easy mark or something like that, and Dean was more than ready to take it down. He’s not a fucking wuss, he knows how shit goes. He was excited more than anything else, because, seriously. Werewolves.
But werewolves operate on a strict cycle. You can get an exact date and time for when a werewolf’s gonna change and schedule the putdown for when it’s at its most hairless. A weredog can be whichever whenever, and Dean’s got the claw marks to prove it. His guess is the fucker knew it’d have hunters on its ass and it was acting all wolf-y to up its shot of scraping out alive. Make them think they’d have it at its weakest, then spring the hound on ‘em and go in for the kill while they’re thrown. Convoluted as all and actual fuck, but what the hell, it almost worked.
Dean had his gun leveled on the guy’s chest when it changed. That’s another thing—werewolves tend to stay in a same-ish shape no matter how you take ‘em, fangs and eyes and dogwhistles and doorbells aside. They’re not wolves, not really. Weredogs are absolutely dogs—fucking disgusting-looking ones, too, if this one was anything to go by—and apparently a guy turning into a dog when he’s not expecting it is enough to put Dean completely off his game and get his face torn open on a mastiff’s scuffed kitchen tile. The underside of the table was all scratched up, too, bizarre, like the thing went around tearing his own house up for kicks when it wasn’t out killing shit and confusing people. That’s what Dean was paying attention to in that minute instead of turning his gun on it, the set dressing, the canine logistics of home decor, while his dad stood by waiting for him to get a grip and fry the damn thing.
Dean’s an idiot. Sam already knows that. He doesn’t have to look so sad about it.
“Christ, Dean,” Sam says quietly.
“Yeah, whatever, I’m a fuckup,” Dean says. “Glad we got that sorted out.” He tries to pull his hand away but Sam holds him in place.
“He just watched,” Sam says. “He could’ve killed it before it even touched you.”
“Stop that. That’s not what it was.”
“No? He didn’t let you get hurt? What am I looking at, Dean?”
“I should’ve killed it myself. I was too—” No, he’s admitted enough. He’s not about to tell his kid brother he was scared. “I let it get the jump on me,” he says. “End of the day, I got off easy.”
“No thanks to him.”
“Yeah, thanks to him. It didn’t just burst into confetti.”
“Still tore your stupid face to ribbons before he bothered to do something.”
Dean bites back a defense. He knew he was gonna have to fight tooth and nail to get Sam to see it his way, spent the awful, quiet car ride home mapping out his plays and pre-grieving his pretty much inevitable loss, ‘cause there’s no getting through to Sam these days. You try to tell him how it is and it’s a fight whether he knows you’re right or not. Half the time Dean walks away questioning himself instead of Sam, which is honestly more infuriating and impossible than just letting Sam rant his throat dry about whatever inane bullshit he’s convinced of this week. He’s a mindfucking little menace, teetering into sixteen with his long legs toppling over his swelled-up too-smart head and knocking down anybody that tries to slip past him.
Dean’s exhausted. He doesn’t wanna fight with him right now. He doesn’t wanna fight with him at all. And he sure as hell doesn’t wanna give Sam any avenues to sway Dean to his side.
In the phoniest, saddest voice Dean can muster up, he asks, “You think my face is stupid?”
Sam fights to keep his smile down, but it’s too late, there it is. “Extremely.”
“I think it’s pretty decent like this,” Dean says. “Hey, who knows? Maybe I’ll get some sickass scars.”
“Dog scars. Really sexy.”
“Hey, you said it, not me.”
Sam rolls his eyes. But he’s running his thumb over Dean’s knuckle, watching their hands together, fucking dorky. He doesn’t try to force the smile down again. It just slips off after a minute, slowly, the whole of him drooping until he looks sadder than he did at the start.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Sam asks. It’s not accusing, for now. Just sad. Like he got left out.
“I did tell you.”
“You wouldn’t have,” he says. Sam flicks his eyes up to Dean’s face, just for a second, then back down again to watch his own hand flatten over Dean’s. “If Dad had stayed, you wouldn’t have.”
It’s another twelve retorts to bite back. No, Sam, probably not. What would he do, pull him aside while John’s lugging the guns in and show him on a doll? Here’s where my gun was when I was too freaked to use it. Here’s where Dad was standing while he waited for me to get my shit together. Come on.
“You’re only even talking to me ‘cause he’s not here,” Sam says. “When Dad gets back—”
“Dad’s not coming back.”
Sam falters. Dean wishes he didn’t say it, but it’s true, and besides that the idea that Sam’s some second-rate company is so bewildering that he had to get something out. Something that wouldn’t be disgustingly revealing. He’s cutting it kinda close.
“You don’t think so?” Sam asks, something odd and totally placeable but really, really not faceable creeping into his voice.
“We’re lucky if he’s back by noon,” Dean says, then swallows thickly. This is a betrayal, he thinks, and the way Sam’s eyes flash when he says it doesn’t help to put out the guilt simmering in his gut.
“I hope he stays gone,” Sam says. He squeezes at Dean’s hand, at his fingers, he’s—he’s so weird. “Hope he never comes back.”
God, give a kid an inch. Dean lets him have his little fantasy, whatever, he’s fifteen. He’ll grow out of this crap eventually. Dean frankly wants nothing less than to see his little brother get bigger, but there’s no whittling Sam’s fangs back down to baby teeth. His eyes are getting sharper by the day, meaner, packing a hell of a bite now that he’s old enough to really latch on and still too young to know that tasting blood means he should drop it. Maybe growing up will teach him to sheathe up the eyeteeth and accept things as he sees them. Maybe, once he gets a little older, he’ll quit peering into Dean’s head to rummage around for new reasons to hate their dad. Otherwise he’ll have to gouge the kid’s eyes out himself.
Sam’s hand leaves his to fold over the side of Dean’s neck. There’s a long set of scratches there, not as bad as his face, but still pretty rough. Sam carefully avoids the worst of them.
“Or we could leave,” Sam says. “While he’s gone. We could just go.”
Dean frowns. Sam’s eyes lift to meet his, and there’s that placeable, unfaceable look again—ugly hope, absolutely grotesque. He’s dead serious, searching Dean’s face for something Dean hopes to God isn’t there. Absently—or maybe intentionally, maybe Dean’s the only one that really does it absently—Sam’s thumb catches under the cord of his necklace. It twists around his finger while the rest of his hand stays settled over Dean’s neck. It feels sort of like he wants Dean to puke his guts up.
Dean forces a laugh. “Go where? Disneyland?”
It’s lame all around and it does nothing to deter Sam. “I mean it, Dean,” he says. “You’ve got your car. There’s barely anything we’d need to take with us. It wouldn’t be that different from how we’re living already. Just—us, instead of—”
“Whoa, okay, easy there, Badlands.” Dean shuffles back, out of Sam’s hands and away from his piercing, pleading eyes. “We can’t just go.”
“We can,” Sam insists. “Come on, we can. Dean.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause Dad needs us, that’s why not!”
Sam glowers. “Maybe he needs you.”
Dean sits up. “You’re the one that doesn’t wanna hunt.”
“He doesn’t care about that,” Sam says, rising up on his elbows. Still a safe distance. “If he needed me, or thought he needed me, he’d drag me out anyway.”
“So you’re pissed when he takes you and you’re pissed when he doesn’t,” Dean says. “You realize there’s no winning that, right?”
“That’s not what I mean,” Sam says. “You know it isn’t.” The pleading-piercing thing is slipping into his voice now, breaking it around the edges. “He doesn’t tell me anything, he doesn’t talk to me—hell, he doesn’t even look at me half the time. He’s either steering me around like a fucking kid or shoving me out of the way.”
“What else is he supposed to do? You’re not giving him a lot of options these days. He has to keep you safe somehow.”
“Yeah, safe. That’s what it is, that’s why you’re getting mauled and I’m getting decked for having a fucking problem—”
“I’m not fighting with you. Sammy, I’m not fighting with you.”
He’s not ‘cause there’s tears threatening to spill out of Sam’s eyes and if Dean has to deal with his angry-crying while he already wants to shoot himself he’s not gonna be able to keep either of them in check.
Sam shuts his eyes tight. Locking up the floodgates. For a second, Dean thinks that might be it. Then, too quick for Dean to brace himself, Sam surges forward and grabs at the front of Dean’s shirt, pulling him down and forcing them back into too-close proximity.
“What if I left?” Sam asks. “‘Cause I—I can’t keep doing this, Dean. Living like this. I can’t. If I left, you’d really…you wouldn’t come with me?”
Dean focuses on the space between Sam’s eyes again. It doesn’t help. He’s right there. His little brother must hate him, he thinks. He must, because he’d have to really fucking hate him to make Dean answer a question like that.
But it’s another one of those cases where he has to say something. Otherwise Sam’s gonna pick an answer for himself and roll with that, believe that, and Dean knows for a fact that Sam won’t guess this one right. He doesn’t even know the honest answer for himself until he thinks of how certain he is that Sam will get it wrong, and get upset, and get awful. Dean knows what that must mean, but—he can’t. He can’t. It’d be worse than any mini-betrayal, worse than all the papercut backstabs he’s been dealing out to his father since he was four years old. That’d be a murder.
He takes too long, caught up in his own head, chasing himself up the walls. Rookie mistake. He should know better.
Sam’s face twists up, then hardens. He lets go of Dean and drops back onto the bed, facing away from him and shuffling off as far as he can without tipping over the side.
For the thousandth time today, Dean thinks to himself, you fucking idiot.
The drive back from the doghouse was almost completely silent. John was jittery at first, tripping on a shitty hunter’s high of guilt-laced adrenaline that Dean is all too familiar with. John kept glancing over at him like he was making sure he was still there, or still alive, which was just way out of proportion. Dean was never gonna die. John wouldn’t have—if the thing had any real shot of killing him, it wouldn’t have gone down how it did. That’s all Dean’s gotta say.
But once the nerves died down John finally spoke. He put his hand on Dean’s knee and he told him, next time, you don’t hesitate. You use the fear to hit it harder. That was it. It was important enough for that to be it. And Dean’s still managed to get it wrong again in the span of a night.
Sam’s breathing is all jagged and weird the way it is when he’s crying, or trying not to cry, and more importantly when he really thinks he’ll be able to hide it. It’s insulting, that’s what it is.
Dean leans over him. “Sam.” He touches his shoulder and Sam shirks away. “Sammy, come on, don’t be a dick. Get back here.”
He tugs Sam onto his back and only narrowly manages not to punch himself in the face when he sees that he’s actually, really crying, little-kid-crying, fuck absolutely off. Dean braces his hands on either side of Sam and tries not to panic—they’re just fighting, scrapping over things that aren’t actually real, it’s not anything more than that, it’s—he fails miserably. Sam’s trying to blink the tears back and he’s doing an equally bang-up job of that. There’s still blood under his nose. Dean reels himself in just enough not to try cleaning him off.
“You’re losing your shit over nothing,” Dean says. “You hear me? Nothing.”
Sam sniffles. “Yeah, feels like nothing.”
The smartassery is somehow more punchworthy when it comes out flanked by tears. At the same time it makes Dean want to swaddle him up and hide him in a dark corner somewhere, and then probably suffocate him with the blankets.
“I need to get out of here, Dean,” Sam says. He shakes his head frantically. “I can’t stay here. I can’t.”
Dean doesn’t ask if Sam would really leave him, because unlike Sam he doesn’t ask trick fucking questions that he knows he won’t like the answer to. He lowers his face closer to Sam’s, which is still against his better judgement, but whatever, whatever, John isn’t here and they’re already acting like chicks and this is the only thing he really has to lose.
“It’s just a bad night,” Dean says. He can feel Sam’s breath stuttering with the effort of keeping himself together. “We’ve had worse. You know we have. It’s not that bad.”
“I don’t care,” Sam says, sounding like he cares a whole goddamn lot. “I hate him.”
“Don’t say that. He’s your father.” It comes out instinctively and it sounds—it sounds exactly how it fucking sounds. It’s fine. It’s fine. He knows how shit goes.
“I don’t care,” Sam repeats, more firmly this time. “He’s not—I’m not—” His hands race up to catch Dean’s wrists where they’re bracketing him in. He doesn’t move them, just holds them, though the hold is restless and skittish, his fingers fluttering over Dean’s veins. “You and me, man, we’d be okay. It wouldn’t even be hard. It’d just be us.”
“Sammy,” Dean says, voice tight. “We’re kids.”
“You’re twenty years old.”
Dean hesitates. “You know what I mean.” His kids.
He watches Sam’s jaw tremble. It’s hard. Looking at him is hard. If John really didn’t look at the kid, Dean would understand why.
Dean’s still looking for something better to say, something that’ll bring this fucking apocalyptic conversation to a close, when Sam asks in a small voice, “You’d really leave me alone?”
It’s so unfathomably hypocritical that Dean almost laughs in his face.
He doesn’t laugh. He thinks about hitting him. He gets a lot closer to that one. His hands curl into fists on the bed. Sam’s eyes are wet, watching him, and Dean is sure he can tell, but Sam does absolutely nothing to brace himself. His hands stay loose and uneasy around Dean’s wrists as he looks up at Dean and waits.
This isn’t going to happen again, Dean realizes. They’re working on the edge of a lapse. His brother has never been the run away with me type before and he sure as hell isn’t gonna give it another go. Take it or leave it.
John’s truck screeches on the pavement. Dean rears back like he’s been yanked away by the scruff. Sam chooses that moment to tighten his grip and gets pulled along halfway before Dean shakes him off and shoves him back down with a hand to his chest.
“You’re asleep,” Dean tells him.
Sam opens his mouth to protest. Dean plants his hand over it. Sam tries to bite his palm. They scuffle until the front door starts to rattle and Sam finally pushes Dean away to flop onto his side. Dean swings his legs over the other side of the bed in time for the hinges to settle and for John to open the bedroom door.
He’s steady on his feet, sober enough to look Dean over and for Dean to feel like he’s getting properly scrutinized. Dad gives Sam the same once-over, then tilts his head toward him. He asleep?
Dean nods. Dad knocks his knuckles on the doorframe twice, softly, then steps away. He leaves the door halfway open behind him.
Dean grits his teeth. Shouldn’t have given Sam the out. Now he’ll know.
Know what, Dean thinks. Not like he doesn’t know enough already. The feeling still sticks.
He slips from the bed and slowly crosses the room, like he’ll really wake him if he moves too fast. When he reaches the doorway, he pauses. He’s not gonna like what he sees if he looks back.
He looks anyway.
Sam is sitting up and staring straight at him, eyes still shining. Wide awake. Obviously, wide awake. He’s tear-stained and stupid-looking in that grimy, girly bed and the sight of him makes Dean completely ashamed of himself. He doesn’t even know what for, not really, but he’s sure that if he asked, Sam would be able to tell him.
Dean turns away. The door clicks shut behind him.