Chapter Text
Dean sighs, flopping down onto his bed dramatically.
His crystal green orbs blink lazily up at the ceiling, watching his ceiling fan make slow lazy circles above him.
God, what a goddamn fucking day. Dean sighs again.
First, the hunt had gone terribly south, and Dean’s wrist had gotten sprained. The bandage they’d use to bind it was starting to itch warmly on Dean’s palm. The car ride had been full of tension as Dean had used the last of Sam’s shower gel for some Dean-personal-fun-time. It wasn’t his fault his tumescent member could only shoot one off if he smelled Sammy’s delicious hair smell.
Dean’s eyes kept being drawn to Sam’s exposed clavicles as he drove—innocuous, yet entirely arresting. He feels like a Victorian prince being ripped asunder by the first peek of a voluptuous and scandalous ankle.
Dean rubs a hand over his face and sighs. He can almost still smell Sammy’s shower gel on his hand. His cock stirs with interest. He’s definitely alone.
Sam’s not talking to him, and Dean is…Dean is horny.
“Okay, no, I’m sorry,” Dean says aloud, sitting up straight in his chair. He quickly moves his mouse, and exits out of the tab. What the hell was that? Dean—well not Dean-Dean, but Dean in the story—had sighed…Dean counts…three times. That was way too many times.
Dean tries to memorize the username of the author, and mentally blacklists them. Anyone who writes about Sam’s clavicles with the lusty breathlessness of a…of a…Dean can’t think of a clever analogy, but it’s weird, okay?
Dean very purposefully does not think about what he’s doing as he clicks back over to his previous tab. He tries to find his place on the rec list again. His first foray into fanfiction is shaping up to be a failure.
Okay.
So…
Okay. It’s not as weird as it sounds.
Life, for Dean Winchester, is kind of…perfect.
It’s been ideal, in the months since they defeated Chuck, in all of the strange, insignificant ways that Dean had missed. Once the main threat had been toppled, life slowly slumped over onto a big bed and let Sam and Dean recover.
The hunts were low-stakes and rewarding. They had enough money (read: infinite) to afford chain motels, which lowered their risk of getting tetanus or bed bugs immensely. The diner food was greasy, the beer was cold, and Dean’s little brother is there every single day Dean wakes up.
Dean feels like he and Sam are living in a sitcom, and not in the weird terrifying way Gabriel had made them try out all those years ago. He and Sam have a clean home, Dean likes experimenting with making pies, and they sit down in the evening with a cold beer in front of the TV. Sam goes out jogging every morning and comes back sweaty with a panting Miracle, who tries nosing her way onto the kitchen table to eat Sam’s unguarded portion of scrambled eggs and bacon. They go out on the weekends—sometimes to the bar in town to play pool not for money (a weird change for Dean, but a welcome one), sometimes to the lake a couple of towns over, sometimes to see Eileen or Jody and the girls or Garth.
They have a reliable dog-boarder whenever they have hunts, but they tend to keep it local unless the case is really messy. They can handle it better than any other hunter could, so their sense of personal responsibility hauls them out of their cosy corner of the world. Even those hunts have their charm, with Sam and Dean bundling into the Impala, taking turns driving and sleeping and stopping on their way back—sometimes exhausted and a little worse for wear—at as many tourist traps as possible.
One of Dean’s favorite pictures of all time, now tacked above his nightstand so he can see it as soon as he wakes up, is Sam looking unimpressed with his hands in his jacket pockets in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Texas. He has a gash on his cheek papered over with butterfly bandages, and his eyes are squinted slightly as he stares into the sunset at Dean, taking the photo.
Dean can’t explain it, but it makes his cheeks hurt from smiling so hard. It’s…Sam. Just Sam.
All that to say, they have a routine. A fantastic one.
And it unfortunately gives Dean a lot of time to think. Dean likes to stay constantly busy—with repairs, with hunts, with music, with women—so he doesn’t have time to think.
But with the lack of an imminent existential threat and truly debilitating domestic joy, Dean thinks.
He wonders whatever happened to that Jesse kid. Dean assumes he’s doing okay in Australia, or wherever, because they were never called in to dispatch him. He wonders about Amy Pond’s son, and how he is. If he still wants Dean’s head on a pike. He wonders about Sarah’s widower and kid. He wonders about Meg’s—the first Meg’s—mother and father, who lost two daughters.
He wonders about what Michael and Adam are getting up to, now out in the world. He fears getting the call that they’ve become a problem, but the last he heard from them, they moved into an apartment in Duluth. Dean wonders if the people in their building know that the being that killed literal Satan is the one with a struggling aloe plant in their window.
Okay, so maybe Dean’s kept more than a strictly casual eye on them, but he knows not to kick gift horses in the teeth.
And Dean wonders—wondered, because he doesn’t wonder anymore—about Chuck’s legacies. About the things that god, Capital-G God, left behind.
Which got him thinking about the Supernatural books.
He and Sam didn’t really keep track of the fans or fandom after the high school musical. Dean kept such poor track of things in fact that the little teen-made craft amulet disappeared out of the Impala. Dean had been a little crushed, but a lot more guilty. He’d failed Sam a second time in terms of the amulet, even in something as stupid as this.
But he’d thought about the books one night, as they watched a rerun of a show set at a Comic-Con, and Dean remembered the convention about their lives. About their homo-something subtext, and discussions of their failures.
Dean had gotten a little mad about it again, and he’d looked up the books (pro tip: don’t search “supernatural books” because you’ll get a whole lot of quack bullshit about white meat magic and local ghost legends).
He’d balked when he saw the number of books, not even including the unpublished ones on Chuck's website. Who on earth would read that many books about him and Sam? Okay, Sam, maybe. He’s a classic comic book hero with the muscles and the hair and the dewy-eyed sense of morality, but Dean is…Dean.
Dean had scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the results page, and something had caught his eye.
SUPERNATURAL FANS: What do we think about Dean’s choice to…
And the webpage title had been cut off for being too long. Dean was intrigued, sue him. He’d scrolled through a million replies on a social media website about Dean in Purgatory and Hell and as a child and when the had the Mark. He almost clicked off, feeling a little nauseous, when he saw a reply to a comment that caught his eye.
xxwetnapkin89xx: No, I agree. Sam was totally in the right. I wrote a post on my blog (link here) about how Dean’s attitude towards Sam has changed over the years.
Huh? No, it hadn’t. Dean immediately clicked on the link, and. Well. The rest was history.
In order to interact with some accounts on the Supernatural fan blog site (called The Roadhouse, which made Dean roll his eyes), Dean had to make his own account, and, well, in for a penny.
He’d immediately tried impala67, but someone had taken it already. And impala-67, and 67impala, and 6impala7.
So Dean, in a stroke of pure creative genius, became s-ampala.
Those were his two favorite characters in Supernatural, anyway, so it seemed fitting. To say he was an active member of the fandom would be a bit of an overstatement. He liked posts occasionally, and more than once replied to a fan question about something that happened in the books.
Who would know better what happened to Dean than Dean? It got a little awkward more than once when Dean mentioned something that apparently wasn't in the books. In response to someone talking about Dad—and that was a can of worms Dean never wanted to reopen—Dean mentioned the wraith hunt that broke his arm when he was twelve, and immediately got lit up with replies.
carjackingdaimpala: omg when did that happen? was that in JWJ? one of papa edlund’s archive? if this is a fic you’re working on pleeeeeeeeease post!!!!!! i need dean whump like i need to breathe. break all of his limbs and make sammy watch!!!!!!!
Dean had to look up a lot of words that day. He was a different man than before he started posting on The Roadhouse.
He was changed even further by the slash.
Dean had stumbled onto their little corner of the site almost entirely on accident, after clicking on a blog whose replies he’d agreed with.
And was greeted with a photoshopped picture of Brad Pitt and Dead Boone from Lost making out.
He’d been wildly, horribly confused. He remembered the “slash fans” Sam had mentioned, and remembered the actors who played Sam and Dean at the high school standing uncomfortably close, but he was hit with a solid wave of pure, unfiltered brother sex.
It had made him so nauseous he’d had to close the tab, but after standing up and pacing for a bit, had sat back down and reopened the tab.
It was weird. Really, really weird.
But the more blogs Dean scrolled and the more fanart and fan theories and analysis of the book he saw, he found that he agreed more with the weird incest people than he did with anyone else in the fandom.
That was a hard pill to swallow.
Well, he agreed with them in almost everything.
Here Dean is, elbow deep in a bottomless, mystifying chasm of people wanting him and his brother to make out “sloppy style,” which Dean doesn’t think sounds appetizing at all. He tried the Victorian-ankle fic recommended by motel-boyking, but clearly their taste is bullshit.
Dean sighs, then stops himself mid-exhale, shaking his head. No, he does not sigh, thank you very much.
It’s been about a week of Dean poking around the “Wincest” side of the fan site, and he’s not any closer to understanding just what the deal is. Dean scrolls down the list of recommendations, and finds that the ones at the bottom are 52,000, 68,000, 72,000, 90,000 words. His eyes widen. What the fuck? He reads one of the descriptions.
On July 4th, 1996, Dean Winchester takes his brother into a field and kisses him. Things get worse from there.
Dean blinks. July 4th, 1996. These people think he kissed Sam in that field in Illinois? Dean balks. Sam was what? 12? 13? Dean pictures Sam’s too-long sleeves and big shining eyes and thin, wet mouth. Dean’s stomach churns, but he can’t quite put a finger on why. Who would want to read 90,000 words about the Fourth of July? Why are there so many Fourth of July conspiracies about "what really happened"?
Fireworks. Fireworks happened.
Why do these people think he and Sam are secretly in love with each other? Sure, they’re closer than the average set of siblings, maybe, but they’re not weird about it. They don’t do anything explicitly incestuous on the daily.
Dean has seen more pictures of himself in that weird business world bent over a desk by Sam in that ugly yellow polo shirt than he’d ever like to see. Ever.
He isn’t in love with Sam. He’d know something like that, thank you very much, and the more he reads thousands and thousands of words of people insisting that he is, the more it gets under his skin.
And that’s another thing: people seem dead-set on Dean being the endless piner, the chaser, the one that harbors an ugly, gnawing love inside of him, while Sam goes along with it. Sometimes Sam is pining after him, but Dean is the instigator a lot of the time.
It makes him nauseous, to think about Sam being…predated on like that. A secret, evil shadow of Dean dogging Sam’s steps, even if they both think it’s beautiful at the end.
And more importantly, Dean Winchester doesn’t pine, thank you very much.
Finally, Dean can’t take it anymore. The morbid curiosity and the lack of concrete answers gets to be too much for him. It takes Dean a few minutes to type his burning question out, then he clicks, “Post.”
The next morning, Dean checks his computer, and his email is swollen with notifications. flapping-cas-wings has responded to your post. bigsmy-eyes has responded to your post. 99velocipastor99 has responded to your post.
Dean pulls up the post with a bit of dread in his stomach. He rereads it.
s-ampala: QUESTION
Hi. Been here a few weeks. Question. Can you give me proof that Sam and Dean are secretly in love with each other? Are there things they DO to make you think that?? I'm talking regular, everyday shit. Outside of the saving each others’ lives stuff, which any sibling would actually do, if they had to, by the way. That doesn’t count.
He scrolls down to the replies.
Most of them are unhelpful, including one by deansleftnipple. Dean puts a protective hand over his own left nipple as he reads it.
deansleftnipple: ummmmm…do you even READ the books?? if you paid attention at all, it bleeds all over the page, lmao. the world-ending stuff is just the icing on a hopeless yearn-cake.
But the more Dean reads, the more he scoffs in incredulity.
That's not true.
They don't do that.
There’s no way he and Sam actually do those things, right? Dean hasn’t ever noticed him or Sam actually doing these things, and he fumbles around the workspace for a pencil and a piece of paper.
He makes a list as he scrolls of the ones with the most up-votes, and comes away with a list of six things.
-
We spend all of our time together
-
I open all of Sam's doors
-
Sam waits for me to eat first? (lie)
-
We cuddle (barf) (also lie)
-
The way we patch each other up is weird?
-
Soulmate anal sex
Okay. Scientific method time. Sam would be proud. Dean knows for a fact number six is conjecture, because the last time he checked, he wasn’t laying pipe in Sam’s backyard, so to speak.
Which just left five things. He and Sam don’t spend all of their time together, or open each other’s doors, or wait for each other to eat, or cuddle, or patch each other up weird. So. Dean’ll pay extra attention in the next few weeks, and report back that these people are smoking crack.
Dean nods decisively and closes his laptop. Oh yeah. He’s going to show them.
~~~
1. they’re glued at the hip. you couldn’t pry them from each other’s sides with a crowbar -playthingsmybeloved
This one should be pretty easy to disprove. The next time grocery day turns up, Dean laces his boots and slips out of the bunker before Sam notices.
The grocery store is busy at this time of morning, and Dean is unexpectedly…well, lonely’s not the right word. He turns around more than once to ask Sam for an opinion, or looks over his shoulder so he can see if Sam’s watching so he can sneak something in the cart. He doesn’t even end up sneaking the bag of chips in, because it’s not as fun if Sam doesn’t notice it later and give him an eye roll.
He’s stuck for almost ten minutes in front of the tofu trying to remember which one Sam normally gets, and ends up just picking one of each and hoping for the best.
Waiting in line to check out takes so long that Dean wants to blow his brains out, and the drive back seems much longer than it usually is.
By the time Dean pulls back into the Bunker’s garage, he’s a little on edge and bummed out.
And then he realizes he’s going to have to take the groceries in multiple trips all by himself and wants to start punching things.
He’s in the middle of grabbing his second load when Sam stumbles down the hallway and directly into him.
“Wh—There you are, man, where did you go?” He asks, and Miracle is hot on his heels. She sniffs at Dean’s bag and sticks her muzzle directly into one of the gaping plastic edges. Dean nudges her with his calf, which is a mistake, because now he has two pairs of big ole’ brown eyes looking at him with confusion and hurt.
Dean holds up his bags.
“I went to the grocery.” He says. Sam frowns.
“Wh—I was just in the library. Did you even try looking?”
Dean shrugs.
“I thought I’d go myself this week.”
Sam doesn’t say anything for a long moment. Dean can’t quite interpret the look on his face, but it doesn’t sit well with him. This is definitely one of his I’m Thinking expressions, but the longer he stares at Dean without saying anything, the more it makes Dean uncomfortable.
He shifts the bags in his hands.
“Did you get my tofu?” Sam finally asks, and Dean could sigh in relief. He nods back towards the ajar door to the garage.
“Oh, little brother, did I ever.”
For the rest of the week, Sam puts tofu in everything he makes, much to Dean’s shock and horror. Miracle, on the other hand, is delighted, because Dean starts shoveling her bowl full when Sam’s not looking.
She's eating tofu for every meal, and then Dean feels bad for basically poisoning her with soy, so he slips her strips of bacon afterwards. She alternates between snoring loudly and begging at Dean's feet all week.
By the time the next Saturday rolls around, he is fastidiously ignoring her in the Dean Cave and fiddling around with his iPad. He jumps about a foot in the air when Sam's breath is suddenly on his neck, wet and hot and right underneath his ear.
"You can move the queen of hearts over here," he says, swiping his finger and stacking the digital queen on top of a black king.
"Never touch another man's Solitaire, Sammy, I taught you better than that." Dean huffs, righteously adjusting in his chair. He looks back at the screen. Ah dammit. Sam revealed that six he's been looking for. Sonovabitch.
Sam hmms, which makes Dean think he's not really taking Dean's life lessons to heart, and flops down in his own recliner with a whoomph. They're both up uncommonly early this morning, and Dean knows in an hour or so, they're going to get up and stretch and pretend that their joints aren't hurting them and start making breakfast.
But for now, they sit in easy silence as Sam pulls out his book and begins to read, and Dean's screen explodes again and again in the cards' You've-Solved-It dance.
“Oh, hey,” Sam says, at some point, and when Dean looks up, Sam is on his phone. Dean checks his watch, and the hands are somewhere around 0705. “I totally forgot, it's Saturday. Farmer's Market."
Sam gets up, stretches just like Dean knew he would, and winces a little when he leans a little too far back on his busted spine. Just like Dean knew he would.
He might be smiling a little stupidly as he puts the legs of his recliner down, sue him.
But then he realizes. They're glued at the hip.
Dean frowns, and reclines his chair again.
“Oh,” He mutters. “Cool.”
The problem is Dean actually likes the farmer's market. He likes ragging on Sam about the weird vegetables he's never seen in his life and the ridiculous prices and the lack of hot women and the blazing sun. But he also likes seeing everyday people in their everyday lives, living and breathing and buying produce for their boring lives because they can, because Sam and Dean won. He likes buying pies from Ms. Marjorie and her tiny little booth and likes talking shit about the weather with the old guys invariably huddled underneath the sun-bleached awnings.
And Dean likes spending time with Sam.
“You—" Sam is stuck mid-motion, but Dean carefully does not look at him. “You’re not coming?”
Dean has to restart his game, because he's already fucked it. He stares at the screen hard, but nothing registers.
“Nah, not feelin’ it today.”
A long pause.
“Oh. Okay.”
A loud woomph jolts Dean out of his reverie, and he's shocked to see Sam sitting back down, pulling his book out and thumbing through the pages. Miracle falls back down at his feet with a loud exhale.
“We can get our stuff from the grocery store this week.” Sam says, and cracks the spine of his book as he settles back in.
“No, man, you should still go,” Dean insists. He tries to put on his cajoling smile, but it feels a little plastic-y and wrong on his face. “If Ms. Marjorie is there, can you get me a shepherd’s pie? Two?”
Sam looks up from his book with that loaded look again, and Dean freezes the smile on his face. There's no way it'll convince Sam of his earnestness, but at least it'll hide the weirdnauseousbad thing happening behind it.
“You want me to go?” Sam asks, slowly.
“Yeah, man, don’t have too much fun, I’m not gonna be able to rescue you from the PTA moms.”
Dean's not joking about the moms. Every young single (and sometimes not so single) mother in a fifteen mile radius is drawn to Sam like a sale at LuLuLemon. It might be his big wide shoulders or the muscle—leaner now, but still enough to bulge in all the right places—hidden by his canvas jacket or his big, wide, wet sympathetic eyes that scream I see you. I understand.
Dean has had to steer Sam away more than once when they start to get grabby.
“Mm.”
Sam is infuriatingly blank, humming in a way that's not upset or happy or acknowledging, just a low, thoughtful hm. Dean lobs his conversation-ender, the biggest olive branch he can think of, with all the gracefulness of lobbing a grenade.
“You can take Baby, but if there’s so much as a bug on the windshield, I’ll kill you.”
“Yeah,” Sam says, not looking at Dean as he stands up. Miracle huffs in annoyance, and trots after Sam as he leaves. Neither of them look back at Dean, not even once.
Dean is antsy as soon as Sam hits the door.
Dean spends the rest of the morning almost nauseated with worry, which pisses him off, which makes him sad. What if Sam runs into car trouble? What if Sam runs into a hunt and decides to take care of it by himself? What if one of their Old Enemies decides to rear their ugly heads, and grabs Sam now that he's by himself?
By the time Sam comes back, an hour earlier than they normally would, Dean huddles them back both into the Dean Cave and closes the door. They watch reruns for the rest of the afternoon.
~~~
Sam is everywhere. And Dean starts to realize that Dean himself puts him there.
Dean, after grabbing his battered library copy of In Cold Blood, mindlessly starts wandering towards Sam's room. It's not even until he's standing in Sam's doorway that he snaps back to himself and realizes he's come to sprawl across Sam's bed while Sam does his research. Dean had gotten lonely.
Dean goes to work on Baby, and Sam putters in after the first hour to plop on the couch that Dean set up against the wall in the garage for that exact purpose. He leans back against one of the arms and Dean finds himself looking up every few minutes to see Sam scrolling lazily through a home goods site, tabbing between two air fryers. He looks up enough that he sees Sam in multiple stages of watching video reviews, going to multiple websites to cross-reference written reviews, and research on the manufacturers. It's the most boring thing Dean can imagine, so why does he keep looking up to watch him?
They have Movie Nights on Fridays and Bar Nights on Saturdays and Grocery Day on Sundays and Laundry Day on Mondays. They can and do spend time apart, but never too far from each other. If they find themselves apart for longer than a few hours, Sam'll wander in, or Dean'll get an itching in his bones that bugs and bugs and bugs him until Sam is standing in front of him again.
Okay. Third times the charm.
Dean waits until Sam is specifically busy, running research for one of Garth's hunter friends in Minnesota. Sam is elbow-deep in esoterica about Guatemalan folklore, and he's started chewing on his thumbnail, so Dean knows he's really into it.
He pauses in the archway to the library. Sam and he are not attached at the hip. They're not. Dean clears his throat.
“Hey, I’m headed into town. I need to get spark plugs from the hardware store.”
He picked the most Sam-averse topic and Sam-averse store possible. It's foolproof.
It takes a few seconds, but Dean can practically hear the wet slurp as Sam's brain registers his words and is pulled from the quagmire of lore.
“Hmm?” Sam says distantly, and then his eyes snap dazedly up to Dean in the doorway. Dean is not endeared by the way his eyes are still a little fuzzy, and that weird feeling in his gut is just nerves.
Dean repeats himself.
Another lengthy pause.
Sam blinks, then closes the book decidedly. “Oh, okay, let me grab my shoes.”
Dean balks. Sam stands, cracking his back, and wanders past Dean into the hallway. Dean is baffled. But…but Sam hates the hardware store. He hates Sal, the guy behind the counter that spits chew-saliva into a plastic water bottle that he keeps tucked in his belt. He hates Dean agonizing for thirty minutes over which parts will be the best substitute for a part that stopped being manufactured in 1987. He hates the smell, like ozone and oil and rot.
He always spends hardware store time pressed up against the communication devices section like a boyfriend to the benches next to the changing room in a department store.
There's no way he wants to actually go with Dean.
But inexplicably, Sam opens the door to the garage, Dean trailing dazedly after him. Sam bends down to grab his boots.
“You need something in town?” Dean asks, weakly. “I’m happy to get it for you man—“
“Are you mad at me?”
Dean blinks. Sam, having sat down on his couch to put on his boots, has dropped the laces mid-tie. He stares up at Dean implacably, mouth set in a hard line.
“What?” Dean sputters. Sam sighs, rolling his eyes.
“Are you mad at me? Is this because of the towel thing? I’ve started hanging them flat, man, I don’t know what you want from me.”
Dean thinks back to the reaming he gave Sam last week about hanging his wet towels on the peg and causing them all to have that mildew-y moist smell no matter how many times Dean washes them. He hadn't thought about it at all since this foray into fan culture shook his little world around.
Dean's chest aches a little, as he watches Sam watch him. He has that same little hard set to his chin that he's always had when he's stubborn, or when he's upset and trying in desperate vain not to show it. This has really been eating at him, Dean realizes.
Dean wanted to prove something, and he hurt his little brother. Does Sam think Dean doesn't want to spend time with him? Fat fucking chance.
But there's no way on this green earth that Dean is going to say, Oh, no, I'm trying to prove to The Roadhouse user playthingsmybeloved that you and I aren't secretly fucking.
Sam is still looking at him earnestly, and the longer Dean fumbles, the more upset he looks.
“No, I ain’t mad at you—Aw, hell.” Dean shakes his head, running a hand through his hair. “I’ll be in the car.”
He turns around and sits his happy ass in the driver's seat. The drive is tense until Dean puts in Dookie as a peace offering, and he and Sam start trying to do a more accurate Billie Joe Armstrong impression. Sam sounds like he has a sinus infection, and Dean laughs so hard he almost swerves into oncoming traffic.
Okay. First experiment, failed. But really, god forbid a guy like hanging out with his brother. Well, come to think of it, God did try to forbid that, and look what happened to that guy.
Just goes to show, he and Sammy are a good team. That one doesn’t count.
REPLY TO playthingsmybeloved;
s-ampala: Okay, so they like to spend time together. That's not a crime. They don't make out or anything. Hardly romantic. Also, what's "playthings"?
playthingsmybeloved: ur in denial, it's fine. and ummm. only THEE definite wincest book, r u kidding me? pls tell me you're not a series 4 purist ughhh. [link] there's my favorite playthings fic, bc i'm feeling generous.
Dean opens the link. Three hours and one very confusing boner later, Dean clears his computer history.