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Thanks to the evil twin for forcing encouraging me to scrape this thing off the floor and get it finished. This fulfils my quota of managing a 10k word fic only once a year. :3
Something Invisible is Gone
Supernatural. Sam/Dean. NC-17. 12500 words.
He can feel the bible in the drawer beside him like another person in the room, but there have never been any answers in there for this.
Something Invisible is Gone
It's crash-stop-bang and the world moves in reverse.
Sam's heart squeezes in panic, turns into a feeble twitching lump. Moments that add up to memories slip through his hands like tiny, slick-skinned fish. His universe becomes a Pollock spray of places and people that look the same and feel no different. He scrabbles through it, smearing the fragments together as he tries to save even the smallest of scraps.
The chaos proves impossible to control and Sam finds himself grasping threads too thin to hold. In a blink he remembers a motel room bed, blankets piled into a fort, Beefaroni straight from the can and the first Superman movie playing on a television that wouldn't stop fizzing out. Dean had made up the dialogue they missed, and with the love of superheroes that young boys possess, they'd jumped back and forth between the beds for hours with cheap, scratchy towels tied around their necks.
A glow blossoms in Sam's stomach, and wherever his body exists, the muscles of his face try to pull his mouth into a smile. But nostalgic warmth withers in on itself as precious seconds peel away like paint from greying wood. The moment drifts out of reach, lost, and Sam forgets why he cared. All he knows is that time's a funny thing when it flows the wrong way.
When he watches the ceiling swim with flames, everything goes black.
*
The world goes from dark to light as Sam's eyes fly open. His ribs feel about to shatter, heart slamming against them in double-time. Seconds crawl by before he realises Dean's hands are what keep his shoulders pinned to the bed. Information filters through his senses piece by piece: the hiss of traffic outside on the rain-slicked road; the quiet mumble of the evening news from the television in the next room over; the smell of leftover Chinese takeout floating over from the writing desk; the strong, steady pressure of Dean's thumbs near his collarbones.
"Dude, you awake now? You hear me?"
I hear you, Sam struggles to say, but the words are jammed so tight in his throat he chokes on them. He coughs hard enough that his eyes water.
Dean eases up to allow Sam to curl onto his side, and Sam makes a valiant attempt at keeping his lungs from evacuating his body.
"Scared me, man."
"Sorry," Sam rasps when he catches his breath. "Sorry, I didn't—" Apologies aren't necessary he reminds himself, and bites off the words before he can fill the air with them.
The mattress creaks as Dean scoots away. He stands up and shifts his weight to keep the light of the lamp between the beds from slicing into his eyes. Slowly, and with one wary eye on Sam, he undoes his watch. "Thought those dreams of yours were long gone."
Sam sits up and rubs a hand across his face. A few days worth of stubble tickles his palms. He'd thought things had gone back to normal too. His arms tingle and he scratches at them, the cynic in him asking when anything has ever been normal. "This was different."
Dean's head jerks up at that, the watch dangling frozen in his fingers instead of tossed onto the nightstand. Chiselled shadows hone the angles of his cheeks, trace the quick flare of his nostrils. "Different how?
"Different, how, Sammy?" he repeats, and curls a fist into Sam's shirt, jerks him forward like it'll pull an answer right out of him.
A shake of his head doesn’t get Dean backing down so Sam shoves Dean's hand away. He draws in a relieved breath when Dean doesn't turn it into a point of contention, and smooths away the wrinkles stretched into the last clean t-shirt he has left. Laundry gets added to the long list of things they need to do between this town and the next. "I'm not sure."
Dean's not satisfied with that and it doesn't take the crease forming deep between his brows for Sam to know it. "Look, it just isn't," Sam says, and throws aside the blankets to slide out of bed, intent on splashing some water on his face and rinsing away the lingering feel of a vision that's left echoing footprints behind.
The carpet hardly crushes under his weight, the countless times its been crossed by cowboy boots and vacuum cleaners has worn it down to the bone. The familiarity of the surroundings helps knock a few levels off Sam's unease, but his shoulders itch until the flimsy bathroom door is a blank brown slate, shut and locked. Dean's worry has dug into his spine like a nettle's sting. A year ago maybe he'd resent the look in Dean's eyes, but right now he only regrets not having a better answer.
He ducks his head under the faucet turned high and gets slammed with the memory of a plush hotel room, Jess pulling him in with a hand in each of his, her smile beaming. Not much of a vacation, but you never come up to the city. I thought you'd like to get away from the dorms for once. She'd leaned in, scraped a slow bite at his jaw, her lips silken, and she didn't notice the way he forced down the part of him that said complimentary shampoo meant Winchester life as much as graveyards did. And just like he'd pushed aside that bitter inner voice, he pushes aside the memory, refuses to face it when it comes so sharp, crisp as a digital snapshot.
The water weighs down his hair, slicks it to his skull, runs as cool relief down his neck to stain his collar wet. Sam's eyes slide closed and he tracks the drops as they trickle under his shirt. He can remember the paths they've traced and more, grainy images flickering in his mind like film run through a cheap projector. He follows the thread of memory back and water rushes up into the faucet, his hand turns the chipped porcelain handle, the door swings open, Dean's eyes fall on him, heavy with concern, asking the same question that plagues Sam now: What the hell is going on?
*
Sam's always had a good memory, not quite eidetic, but close. This though, this is ridiculous. His head feels like the shelves at Bobby's, straining with the weight of knowledge arcane, mundane, and a good measure of everything between. For each moment he recalls, there are another dozen offering themselves up, most of them the random junk you'd take in, process, and dump as unimportant without any conscious effort. The rare others though aren’t quite memories; they’re a lot more like his old visions than he's comfortable with—hints of things that could happen woven into being, their fibres resonating with an eerie sense that the odds weighed equally in their favour.
"So, you've got TiVo in your skull on top of all the useless junk facts that you've managed to pick up over the years," Dean says. He dumps another cream into his coffee and stirs it until the smoky wisps of white disappear. "Sounds cool to me. And maybe since you had the better line of sight, you lucky dog, you can tell me-"
"Black with pink trim," Sam answers, and it isn't until Dean's voice is winding down on, "What colour panties that little redhead waitress flashed us," that he realises that the question ringing cocksure in his head doesn't quite match in tone to the one dying in the air.
Dean doesn't bat an eye, just tongues at the inside of his lower lip like he's got a poppy seed stuck in his teeth, and says, "Huh."
Sam flicks a plastic wrapped toothpick to him. "Could you maybe?"
"Yeah, maybe I could," Dean says, and resorts to picking at his teeth with a fingernail. Sam glances away before Dean can show him whatever bit of food it was.
"Use a napkin. Please." It's stuff like this which has made Sam want to melt into a hundred different upholstered seats since he was old enough to understand what manners were. He hears Dean suck the tip of his finger clean and glances back in time to find Dean leaning back, his arm stretching out comfortably over the top of the booth. Of course Dean is taking this in stride, he’s not the one whose head is about to explode.
Dean presses his lips together. His index finger rubs absently against a crack in the shiny red vinyl. "Could be less like TiVo and more like you're finally turning into some kind of mind-probing, spoon-bending wonderboy."
"It's not—" Sam rolls his eyes as Dean snags the spoon from his coffee and balances it on his finger. "I heard you say it. Or heard how you were going to say it, before I jumped the gun." Saying it aloud makes it seem so stupid, so improbable, and Sam wonders if he'd imagined everything. It isn't a stretch given how well he knows his brother that he'd unconsciously respond to Dean still being stuck on their waitress's choice of undergarments.
Dean looks at him funny. Sam stares back. Finally, Dean screws his mouth to the side to squeeze out a whispered: "What am I thinking?"
Sam throws his hands up, because the alternative is dropping his head into them. "I have no idea. Dean, c'mon."
"I'm just fucking with ya, man."
"Well, could you stop?"
"Yeah, maybe I could," Dean says, but this time the tone of his voice has softened, and Sam's thankful for it, 'cause that means he's serious.
*
The Impala charges through the rain and the world slips by in fits of drumming and hissing. Sam can hear each shift of the weather through the double-thick improvised muffler he has wrapped around his head to cover both his eyes and his ears.
"I'm going crazy," he says.
Dean shifts in the driver's seat. "What?"
Sam pulls down the scarf and repeats himself. Everything outside the car is flat and black beyond the scope of the headlights.
"Getting worse?"
"That would be a bit of an understatement."
Dean's mouth goes tight. He fumbles through the jacket crumpled on the seat next to him for his phone and starts jabbing at numbers with his thumb.
"Who are you calling?"
"You watched me dial, didn't you? Is your mutant brain power failing you already?"
Despite the pervasive headache that's been plaguing Sam all day, he rises to the bait and shuts his eyes. A kaleidoscope of dim, geometric shapes waltz across the back of his eyelids. They blur and fade to static as Sam focuses on recalling the rhythm of Dean's thumb as it flicked across the keypad.
A miniscule amount of effort has the image which envelopes his senses slowing down. As it does, he finds the flow of Dean's strong-jointed thumb mesmerising. The tendons in Dean's wrist shift faintly beneath thin blue veins that look too delicate to belong to an arm nicked with a dozen scars. Sam watches the shift of skin over the jutting bone of Dean's thumb so intently that he completely misses the numbers dialled. The replay of the memory has advanced to Dean lifting his arm to put the phone near his ear, and Sam squeezes his eyes tighter, holds on to the moment so hard that the time in his vision grinds to a stop.
Dean lashes are swept down, frozen at the peak of a blink. Those too, Sam thinks, seem out of place when he's so accustomed to the general idea of who Dean is and how Dean looks. It's startling to realise that he hardly ever really looks at his brother. Dean is poised to press the button to start the call. His lips are pursed slightly, and the freckles on his skin are far less faint than Sam remembers them to be. When he gets to them, the numbers seem huge on the phone's softly glowing screen.
Wildly, Sam wonders if he opens his eyes if everything outside will be hanging stalled, too.
But he's too afraid to find out, and then he's listening to Dean leave a message on Missouri's machine, the sound of Dean's voice somehow enough to block out the rest of the world until Sam can catch his breath.
*
A week later they're in the barrio of a border town and Sam can't keep still. Places like this make him nervous, not because the streets are webbed with cracks and they're the only white faces in a six block radius, but because of Dean. Thick-armed tough guys with shaved heads and short tempers are the same everywhere; he and Dean might get some slack for rolling up in the Impala, but the car only holds the attention of men like that to a point. And right now, they're busy eyeballing Dean as he's busy eyeballing the curvy girls hanging around sucking down juice popsicles in front of the little carneceria across the street.
"Dean, we're here for a reason."
"Right," Dean says, and squints up at the blaze of the sun before shoving his keys into his pocket and pointing towards the stairs tucked between a dollar store and a beauty salon. He takes the steps two at a time, the wooden railing rattling and losing flakes of paint in his wake. On the landing, a cluster of gutted candles in glass holders and small picture frames tied with coloured ribbons vie for space. Dean gestures between them and the dark face of the numberless door. "You sure you want to do this? We're two steps away from drinking chicken blood."
"Missouri said she's the one, right?"
"Still your call, Uri."
The door opens before they knock and Dean's expression does a 180 faster than a weathervane in a tornado. "Hi there," Dean says, and amps up the wattage on his smile. Sam isn't the least bit surprised to discover the face peering out at them belongs to an attractive girl roughly their age.
"I'm Dean, this is my brother Sam. We're looking for Ysenia."
When he'd been too restless to study and sick of sweater-vest laden suburbia, Sam had spent enough time stretching his legs along the streets east of the 101 to wince a little as Dean butchers the pronunciation. He smiles over Dean's shoulder anyway. "Missouri sent us."
"I know," the girl says, "she and I share some of the same gifts. It's why she sent you, remember?" Her gaze flicks to Sam but stays mostly on Dean, who smiles a little broader at the way she hangs on the door and chews on her lip. Her dark hair curls thick over her bare shoulders, and she toys with the strings of a thin cotton halter-top patterned with tiny flowers. Sam tries not to notice how enough light filters through to silhouette her body beneath it. "Did you bring the cord and the piece of liver?"
"Right here, darling," Dean says, pulling the small butcher's packet from his jacket pocket. "Sam's got the string."
She smiles as she plucks the package out of his hands and then shoves him aside with remarkable ease. She crooks a manicured finger at Sam. "You, inside. Your brother waits out here."
Sam can't help but cock an eyebrow and smirk at Dean's sulking as he inches past. He hands her the length of white satin cord. She loops it around her wrist next to a beaded rosary.
"Is it necessary, I mean, that Dean wait outside?" Sam asks once the door is shut. He tries to be discreet as he takes in the décor. Every surface is stacked with candles and cups, the walls plastered with gilt-framed pictures of saints, martyrs, and creepy, red-robed skeletons.
Ysenia unwraps the liver and crouches, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "His belief in God is not as strong as yours," she says absently, and croons when a nappy little dog comes skittering around the corner from what Sam guesses to be the kitchen.
"The liver was for the dog?"
"Even for Missouri's friends, I don't work gratis," she says, leaving the meat unwrapped on the floor. She rises and sets her hands firmly on Sam's shoulders. "Now, is it the past that you see, or things yet to come?"
"Both," Sam says, then immediately shakes his head. "Sorry, not exactly, this is hard to explain." He wishes he could sit down, wrap his hands over his knees or something to keep away the awkward want to fidget under her scrutiny. "I used to have visions, things that might happen, but they were specific, tied to people that were…like me." He swallows, stalls for a second to figure out how much to say. "But that hasn't happened since—for a while. Now it's like I've got some kind of window to the past, and sometimes a few seconds ahead."
"You touched the other side and it was not the Lord Jesus that called you back," Ysenia says, her hands moving to stroke Sam's face, rest there lightly. The rosary wound around her wrist like a bracelet clicks, the cross swaying in the edge of his field of vision. Sam's skin tingles. "Did you think the price of your brother's selfishness would rest entirely upon his shoulders?"
On the floor beside them, Ysenia's dog snuffles and licks at the waxed butcher paper, whines when there's nothing more to be had.
Sam swallows down the bitterness that rises in his throat. "What can I do?"
"Not much, I'm afraid," she answers quietly.
The cord at her wrist loosens, writhes and thickens as Sam watches, the sheen of it turning to the gleam of scales. A thin albino snake hisses at him, and he draws back as Ysenia's slender fingers clamp around his wrist and hold him firm. The snake wriggles forward, moves from her hand to his, its belly warm as it slides over his fingers. It nudges under his cuff to wind around his forearm, and Ysenia catches his chin with her other hand, forces his gaze to meet her own. Her deep brown eyes widen to white around the edges before they roll back, blossom red, veins bursting as blood leaks like tears down the contours of her face.
She blinks and Sam's head buzzes with a dozen different ways this could have gone, most of them poorly for one or the both of them. He staggers back a step, his arm aching with the sting of phantom fangs, but he can't look away from the trap of Ysenia's eyes, normal again. She wipes her face, raises up on her toes, and he leans in reflexively.
She kisses him, not on the mouth but on the rise of his cheek, and she hesitates for a heartbeat before easing down. "Know your sins, Samuel Winchester, and perhaps God will forgive you, perhaps the Blessed Virgin will help you learn your gifts."
Ysenia releases him, and when Sam looks down, a raised white scar stretches from his wrist to his elbow.
"Now get out of my house and never return."
*
"What happened in there?" Dean asks when Sam drops into the car and slams the door shut. Dean keys the ignition, smiles at the answering growl, and glances over while putting the car into gear.
"Honestly, I have no idea." Sam tugs his shirtsleeve down over his wrist, then thinks better of it and peels it back, showing off his forearm to Dean.
Dean hits the brake halfway into the street. A pick-up truck swerves around them, honking. "The hell is that?"
Sam gestures at the road before Dean's protective hackles can raise up and he goes and does something stupid like charging back up the stairs. "It's supposed to help."
Dean's hands flex as he shifts his grip on the wheel. His gaze flicks past Sam, but pulls back, and then he's easing into the sparse traffic like there hadn't been bloody murder in his eyes. "It better. We passed up two minor hauntings to get here fast enough for that girl to see you."
"I know." Sam cranks down the window, lets his knees splay and props his elbow on the door. "Back to Nevada then?"
Dean jams a cassette into the player and even if Sam can close his eyes and call up what had been his peripheral vision to figure out precisely how many were passed up before Dean settled on Deep Purple, things feel like they should again. "That spirit stalking that hotel isn't going to off itself," Dean says, and slides on his sunglasses before adding, "again."
Whatever had happened, Sam's shoulders feel looser, his world making a slow roll back towards something he could call normal. He hides a smile behind his fingers and looks forward to when they're on the open road again, hedged between fields that stretch for miles and miles and that skim by too fast for the details to stick.
*
The poltergeist turns out to be almost as dusty as the casino it haunts, but that doesn't mean it makes their job easy. By the end of day two, both Sam and Dean earned themselves their fair share of nicks and bruises, but the silver lining is that management of the Nomad is one of the rare believers. Sam supposes that with the average mortality rate of a hotel it shouldn't be as surprising as it first had seemed. For toasting the pest, they earn themselves a week on the house which includes, much to Dean's gluttonous delight, free reign of the buffet.
"So, ghostie number two is lurking in a mineshaft just over a couple hours away. With any luck we'll have its bones smoked in time to get back for dinner theatre."
Sam watches horrified as Dean scoops a few forkfuls of macaroni and cheese onto a fat slice of prime rib and folds the mess up like a taco.
"Something here isn't right."
"You say that, but you haven't even tasted it," Dean says, leaning forward so his overflowing plate will catch anything that falls. His fingers glisten with au jus in the warm light.
"I don't need to, but that's not what I meant." The job isn't done and Sam can feel it, knows in the marrow of his bones that during the hunt he saw a piece to a bigger puzzle. There's still something nasty lurking in this place and it isn't just the design on the static-hoarding carpets. His memories are like the casino floor though, too much to sift through, a labyrinthine jumble that threatens to trap him in the chaos and noise the deeper he goes.
Dean eyes him thoughtfully, wipes sauce from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Dean's head dips in a nod. He's smiling when he looks up at Sam again. His eyes gleam, wicked like a piece of broken glass, and something in Sam's stomach flips as Dean licks his fingers clean.
"Well then," he says, wiping his hand dry and tucking his napkin under the edge of his plate, "I'll start nosing around the regulars at the bar, and you can start up again with the staff."
*
By ten o'clock, Sam's gone through the cleaning staff, the security staff, and the kitchen staff. Not a soul on any of the shifts has noticed anything new, and the ones who know he's responsible for the lack of flying silverware end up spending all their time thanking him instead of giving him any fresh leads. The accolades would be welcome if he wasn't so sure that things weren't peachy keen like everyone believes. What really makes Sam grind his teeth though is not having anything to go on but a persistent, nagging feeling at the back of his brain.
His arm throbs, the raised white scar a line of heat under his shirtsleeve. Whatever the thing does it's been helping, otherwise Sam's pretty sure being in this place—226 slot machines, 3 elevators currently at floors 8, 5, and 16 — would drive him crazy.
In his head, he hears Dean's voice say, "Chill out, Rain Man, and stop worrying. If there's something to find, we'll find it." The real Dean however is probably dying to tell him to hit the poker tables and put his skills to good use. After all, they've only got six days left on their free ride.
Sam smiles to himself. A throng of old ladies in loud patterned blouses and big glasses shuffle out of the elevators to crowd the hallway and he slows down to edge past them. Usually the elderly seem to pack it in early, but what did he know, maybe it was grannies night out. Maybe he's overthinking things too, the days upon days of being bombarded with an excess of stimulation leaving him trying to fill in the gaps when those gaps are supposed to be there.
Finally free of the permed and perfumed mob, Sam beelines for the bar. For a second-rate casino, the place tries hard to put on the nightlife. Music slams out past a cluster of ceiling-height tropical plants and ends up in a fight to the death with the cacophony of the slots. Sam wrinkles his nose as the mishmash of sound swarms around him. He manages to put on a smile for the bouncer lurking in the entryway foliage and slips inside to where drunken chatter and the clink of glasses takes up the job of vying for supremacy with the speakers.
This isn't their usual scene, not by a long shot, but Dean is making the most of it. He's smack dab in the middle of a group of girls with lipstick as shiny as their high-heeled shoes. There's no other word than undulating for the way the scatter of dancers are moving, and the one in the glittery dress who has her arms around Dean's neck stays plastered against his front like her life depends on it.
Sam rubs his temples, but this is a familiar headache, the sort that comes from a fresh reminder that Dean frequently gets to live it up while he's the one who ends up inching past a snail-paced herd of blue-haired churchgoers.
He sighs and tries to catch Dean's attention, but it's firmly fixed on his partner's cleavage. Sam follows Dean's gaze, can't help but appreciate the sight too, but then he's backtracking, jumping up to the column of Dean's neck, pale against the dark of his tee. The girl must have just got him to agree to dance, there's no sheen of sweat on his skin, his hands practically chaste in their grip high on her waist. But he's moving with the girl in a way that's anything but pure and innocent, his hips rolling wavelike like a rodeo rider caught in slow motion, and Sam feels the pressure in his skull spike before the crash-stop-bang—
He can see it: how he could slide his arm between Dean and the girl, curl his hand over Dean's shoulder to take all of Dean's focus. A pair of tits distracts Dean easily enough, but Sam can turn up the gravity, pull Dean to him. Pull him away, pull him close, get those hips aligned to his own and feel that roll with the whole of his body. They'd slide together, move as one, hearts pounding harder than the bass, and bright eyes would go from startled to competitive until they faded into the heaviness of lust.
The scar burns like a warning and Sam clutches his forearm. This, this will be his sin.
This has always been his sin.
Sam moans, sick to his soul from a want he thought he'd packed down hard enough to forget, that he'd ignored like a phantom limb through all the miles between here and Stanford.
He slips into the crowd, winds through the push of bodies without pause, his body in synch with his mind, knowing instinctively where to go to avoid being slowed down. Sam heads for them, towards the sinuous push of their bodies. Curve of muscle, curve of lip, hard and soft, sharp and sweet, and that was just Dean. All Dean.
His arm goes between them. The pull of futures Sam shouldn't know claw at him, hungry to know life. They hook into his very being as he leans down, and stubble scrapes beneath his lips as his mouth grazes Dean's cheek.
"I'm going upstairs," Sam chokes out, when what he really wants to say is, Leave the girl. I want you. You look good enough to fuck.
It isn't until the elevator counts up the floors into double digits that he feels the thread of that potential moment slip away, too far gone now to resurrect, to go back and tug it—tug Dean—into place, too thin to follow towards crumpled sheets and kiss-bruised lips.
Staring at his reflection, Sam knows the shape of regret as it carves his mouth into its form.
*
Cold showers never work like they're supposed to. Sam lays shivering in the air conditioned room, his mind humming electric-current alive. He can feel the bible in the drawer beside him like another person in the room, but there have never been any answers in there for this. None he could stomach, anyway. Sorry Gideon, maybe next time.
Behind his eyelids he can see the shape of Dean's body, the movement of his spine as he had leaned back, let that girl press harder against him with the grind and push of exhibitionistic foreplay.
Sam was eleven the first time Dean brought a girl home. He'd woken up, old enough by that point to start cluing in why they had to be so careful all the time and what really lurked out there in the darkness. He'd woken up and trudged towards the living room with fear choking his heart and there was Dean, kissing some girl like people kissed in the movies, faces smooshed up together only more wet.
Sam still doesn't know why he hadn't said anything, just stood there and watched Dean talk her into taking off her shirt. Her tits were peeking out of her bra when she spotted him, clutching at his crotch even though he didn't know a thing yet about jerking off.
Dean had been so pissed when she got embarrassed and left…
"She was going to let me touch her pussy. Maybe even do it." Dean whirlwinds past, leather jacket snapping as he throws the keys to Dad's car onto the dresser. It's a little girl's dresser, painted white with purple trim, but they're so used to staying in places with rooms that they don't fit in that this time Dean had just made a face instead of complaining about it.
"I’m sorry, Dean. I’m sorry."
“Damn right you’re sorry.” Apologies don’t mean much when Dean is angry like this, it has to burn out of his system, same as Dad.
“You can kiss me if you want. I’d do it with you.”
Dean’s eyes turn into saucers. He steps back, like Sam’s grown vampire fangs or something, and his heel hits the dresser. The keys to the car fall to the floor. Neither of them really notice.
“Promise I won’t tell.” Sam says, and Dean doesn’t react. It’s just enough for Sam to figure out that telling isn’t really the problem.
“You turn into a fag on my watch and Dad’ll kill me.”
It’s something wrong with him.
*
Sam hadn’t really fallen asleep, but a memory that old felt remarkably like a dream, the flurry of stirred-up emotions belonging to someone other than himself. He isn’t that boy anymore, uncertain and worried about his big brother rejecting him. That boy had grown up, nearly lived his dream of normalcy, and survived the pain of having it all ripped away.
That boy had toughened up trial by fire. Hidden in the darkness, Sam pulls his mouth into a tight smile, and wonders how narrow Dean’s worldview remains. How much of that macho bullshit is tied up with the worry that someone will find out he used to moan like a slut with a cock in his mouth. And his brother’s at that.
Sam’s eyes focus on a point somewhere beyond the ceiling, and in the hush of the room he can feel Dean’s future flaking to ash as each grain disappears from the glass of his lifespan. Their future in all permutations vanishes just as swiftly.
The thing in his arm lashes its tail.
In the next room over, a baby wails. A part of Sam wonders what kind of person would bring a baby to a casino. A man like their father would, in theory, but he'd hated any place that had more than twenty rooms to rent. Crowds mean anonymity, but crowds also meant danger, collateral damage. Roadside motels that might've been the cream of the crop thirty odd years ago were often too eager for customers to ask questions.
That's ingrained in him deep enough that he still doesn't feel right laying here.
"...you never come up to the city."
Sam's hand creeps down his belly. His fingers pause at the waist of his shorts, edge of elastic softly zipzipping under the scraping edge of his thumbnail. Jess had looked so beautiful standing in the middle of that hotel room, her hair swept back into a loose tail and tiny scraps of lacy black fabric clinging to her curves. If he tried, he could relive that moment too, breathe in her scent again like she'd never died.
But Sam isn't that boy anymore either. And his dreams of marriage then had been as hollow as when he'd still been clinging to Dean's shirttails.
"I'd marry Cindy Crawford in a heartbeat."
"That's lame."
"Oh yeah, well who do you want to marry when you grow up?"
"I want to marry you."
"Shut up before Dad hears you talk like that."
Unfolding his arms from behind his head, Sam sits up, arranging himself cross-legged on the bed. He can't do this anymore, dredge up old memories vividly enough to live them all over again. They'd been hard enough to try and forget the first time around.
And it'd be so easy, too easy, to give in to devilish whispers and use his ability to lead Dean down that path again. To turn him. Dean, so easy to use, buttons laid out in a neat row ready to push.
Like TiVo, Dean had said, and Sam steels himself to search for what he needs to know. In a flash, the last few days rewind, going faster and faster until the minutes are images spinning by like cards in a Rolodex.
He pauses too late: highway rest stop, Dean coming out of the bathroom with water dripping down his face, lifting his shirt to wipe it away. There's irritation, overstimulus, but the filter Ysenia had given him clears things up, and there, under it all, Sam can feel the undercurrent. Ripple of want, curl of desire.
He groans miserably, tries again, and then he has it: rickety stairs creaking under their weight, Dean his usual warm pillar of strength nearby, and then skip-flash-blink: Ysenia, her eyes turning to blood but her mouth still moving.
This memory doesn’t stay easily, and he fights to keep the swelling darkness at bay and hold the fragments in place.
"Not thoughts that you read, Sam Winchester, it is probabilities. You are neither medium nor oracle, you are a catalyst.
"God may help you, but until He shows you the way, there is this." Her grip hardens, nails carving into his skin. Her head whips to look at him, bloodied eyes seeming to cross the span of time to see him as he is, a passenger in his own mind. “It eats some of what plagues you, but it will starve on scraps. Feed to it that what you wish to forget."
The swim back to the present leaves Sam drained, his body trembling with exhaustion. Sweat dampens his hair, curled strands sticking to his cheeks. The devourer in his arm writhes, the scar twisting along his flesh. Its hunger spreads like poison in his blood.
On the surface his arm resembles a suicide gone wrong. And that's what it is, Sam thinks, running his fingers from wrist to elbow. He's held on to his sins for so long he's been killing himself for them. He only has glimpses of what could be, not what could have been, but the questions are there. Would Jess have lived? Dad? Would Dean be whole if he hadn’t selfishly run off for greener pastures? If he’d not pressed and pressed until his own brother had given in to his sick wants? Gorge rises in his throat.
Know your sins.
He has too many to count.
Shaking and fevered Sam closes his eyes and opens his mind, pours everything he wishes he wasn't into that hungry mouth hidden beneath his skin.
He's losing moments, dozens of them, but the cost of keeping them feels too dear.
*
Sam knows focus, knows relief, knows for the first time how heavy the burden of guilt had been. There's no wildfire flash of jealousy to go with the embarrassment when Dean stumbles in at a quarter past three smelling like sex and booze.
And if something in him triggers when Dean shucks off his pants and stands silhouetted in the light of the bathroom, well, he doesn't need to hold onto that.
*
[on to part two...]
Something Invisible is Gone
Supernatural. Sam/Dean. NC-17. 12500 words.
He can feel the bible in the drawer beside him like another person in the room, but there have never been any answers in there for this.
It's crash-stop-bang and the world moves in reverse.
Sam's heart squeezes in panic, turns into a feeble twitching lump. Moments that add up to memories slip through his hands like tiny, slick-skinned fish. His universe becomes a Pollock spray of places and people that look the same and feel no different. He scrabbles through it, smearing the fragments together as he tries to save even the smallest of scraps.
The chaos proves impossible to control and Sam finds himself grasping threads too thin to hold. In a blink he remembers a motel room bed, blankets piled into a fort, Beefaroni straight from the can and the first Superman movie playing on a television that wouldn't stop fizzing out. Dean had made up the dialogue they missed, and with the love of superheroes that young boys possess, they'd jumped back and forth between the beds for hours with cheap, scratchy towels tied around their necks.
A glow blossoms in Sam's stomach, and wherever his body exists, the muscles of his face try to pull his mouth into a smile. But nostalgic warmth withers in on itself as precious seconds peel away like paint from greying wood. The moment drifts out of reach, lost, and Sam forgets why he cared. All he knows is that time's a funny thing when it flows the wrong way.
When he watches the ceiling swim with flames, everything goes black.
The world goes from dark to light as Sam's eyes fly open. His ribs feel about to shatter, heart slamming against them in double-time. Seconds crawl by before he realises Dean's hands are what keep his shoulders pinned to the bed. Information filters through his senses piece by piece: the hiss of traffic outside on the rain-slicked road; the quiet mumble of the evening news from the television in the next room over; the smell of leftover Chinese takeout floating over from the writing desk; the strong, steady pressure of Dean's thumbs near his collarbones.
"Dude, you awake now? You hear me?"
I hear you, Sam struggles to say, but the words are jammed so tight in his throat he chokes on them. He coughs hard enough that his eyes water.
Dean eases up to allow Sam to curl onto his side, and Sam makes a valiant attempt at keeping his lungs from evacuating his body.
"Scared me, man."
"Sorry," Sam rasps when he catches his breath. "Sorry, I didn't—" Apologies aren't necessary he reminds himself, and bites off the words before he can fill the air with them.
The mattress creaks as Dean scoots away. He stands up and shifts his weight to keep the light of the lamp between the beds from slicing into his eyes. Slowly, and with one wary eye on Sam, he undoes his watch. "Thought those dreams of yours were long gone."
Sam sits up and rubs a hand across his face. A few days worth of stubble tickles his palms. He'd thought things had gone back to normal too. His arms tingle and he scratches at them, the cynic in him asking when anything has ever been normal. "This was different."
Dean's head jerks up at that, the watch dangling frozen in his fingers instead of tossed onto the nightstand. Chiselled shadows hone the angles of his cheeks, trace the quick flare of his nostrils. "Different how?
"Different, how, Sammy?" he repeats, and curls a fist into Sam's shirt, jerks him forward like it'll pull an answer right out of him.
A shake of his head doesn’t get Dean backing down so Sam shoves Dean's hand away. He draws in a relieved breath when Dean doesn't turn it into a point of contention, and smooths away the wrinkles stretched into the last clean t-shirt he has left. Laundry gets added to the long list of things they need to do between this town and the next. "I'm not sure."
Dean's not satisfied with that and it doesn't take the crease forming deep between his brows for Sam to know it. "Look, it just isn't," Sam says, and throws aside the blankets to slide out of bed, intent on splashing some water on his face and rinsing away the lingering feel of a vision that's left echoing footprints behind.
The carpet hardly crushes under his weight, the countless times its been crossed by cowboy boots and vacuum cleaners has worn it down to the bone. The familiarity of the surroundings helps knock a few levels off Sam's unease, but his shoulders itch until the flimsy bathroom door is a blank brown slate, shut and locked. Dean's worry has dug into his spine like a nettle's sting. A year ago maybe he'd resent the look in Dean's eyes, but right now he only regrets not having a better answer.
He ducks his head under the faucet turned high and gets slammed with the memory of a plush hotel room, Jess pulling him in with a hand in each of his, her smile beaming. Not much of a vacation, but you never come up to the city. I thought you'd like to get away from the dorms for once. She'd leaned in, scraped a slow bite at his jaw, her lips silken, and she didn't notice the way he forced down the part of him that said complimentary shampoo meant Winchester life as much as graveyards did. And just like he'd pushed aside that bitter inner voice, he pushes aside the memory, refuses to face it when it comes so sharp, crisp as a digital snapshot.
The water weighs down his hair, slicks it to his skull, runs as cool relief down his neck to stain his collar wet. Sam's eyes slide closed and he tracks the drops as they trickle under his shirt. He can remember the paths they've traced and more, grainy images flickering in his mind like film run through a cheap projector. He follows the thread of memory back and water rushes up into the faucet, his hand turns the chipped porcelain handle, the door swings open, Dean's eyes fall on him, heavy with concern, asking the same question that plagues Sam now: What the hell is going on?
Sam's always had a good memory, not quite eidetic, but close. This though, this is ridiculous. His head feels like the shelves at Bobby's, straining with the weight of knowledge arcane, mundane, and a good measure of everything between. For each moment he recalls, there are another dozen offering themselves up, most of them the random junk you'd take in, process, and dump as unimportant without any conscious effort. The rare others though aren’t quite memories; they’re a lot more like his old visions than he's comfortable with—hints of things that could happen woven into being, their fibres resonating with an eerie sense that the odds weighed equally in their favour.
"So, you've got TiVo in your skull on top of all the useless junk facts that you've managed to pick up over the years," Dean says. He dumps another cream into his coffee and stirs it until the smoky wisps of white disappear. "Sounds cool to me. And maybe since you had the better line of sight, you lucky dog, you can tell me-"
"Black with pink trim," Sam answers, and it isn't until Dean's voice is winding down on, "What colour panties that little redhead waitress flashed us," that he realises that the question ringing cocksure in his head doesn't quite match in tone to the one dying in the air.
Dean doesn't bat an eye, just tongues at the inside of his lower lip like he's got a poppy seed stuck in his teeth, and says, "Huh."
Sam flicks a plastic wrapped toothpick to him. "Could you maybe?"
"Yeah, maybe I could," Dean says, and resorts to picking at his teeth with a fingernail. Sam glances away before Dean can show him whatever bit of food it was.
"Use a napkin. Please." It's stuff like this which has made Sam want to melt into a hundred different upholstered seats since he was old enough to understand what manners were. He hears Dean suck the tip of his finger clean and glances back in time to find Dean leaning back, his arm stretching out comfortably over the top of the booth. Of course Dean is taking this in stride, he’s not the one whose head is about to explode.
Dean presses his lips together. His index finger rubs absently against a crack in the shiny red vinyl. "Could be less like TiVo and more like you're finally turning into some kind of mind-probing, spoon-bending wonderboy."
"It's not—" Sam rolls his eyes as Dean snags the spoon from his coffee and balances it on his finger. "I heard you say it. Or heard how you were going to say it, before I jumped the gun." Saying it aloud makes it seem so stupid, so improbable, and Sam wonders if he'd imagined everything. It isn't a stretch given how well he knows his brother that he'd unconsciously respond to Dean still being stuck on their waitress's choice of undergarments.
Dean looks at him funny. Sam stares back. Finally, Dean screws his mouth to the side to squeeze out a whispered: "What am I thinking?"
Sam throws his hands up, because the alternative is dropping his head into them. "I have no idea. Dean, c'mon."
"I'm just fucking with ya, man."
"Well, could you stop?"
"Yeah, maybe I could," Dean says, but this time the tone of his voice has softened, and Sam's thankful for it, 'cause that means he's serious.
The Impala charges through the rain and the world slips by in fits of drumming and hissing. Sam can hear each shift of the weather through the double-thick improvised muffler he has wrapped around his head to cover both his eyes and his ears.
"I'm going crazy," he says.
Dean shifts in the driver's seat. "What?"
Sam pulls down the scarf and repeats himself. Everything outside the car is flat and black beyond the scope of the headlights.
"Getting worse?"
"That would be a bit of an understatement."
Dean's mouth goes tight. He fumbles through the jacket crumpled on the seat next to him for his phone and starts jabbing at numbers with his thumb.
"Who are you calling?"
"You watched me dial, didn't you? Is your mutant brain power failing you already?"
Despite the pervasive headache that's been plaguing Sam all day, he rises to the bait and shuts his eyes. A kaleidoscope of dim, geometric shapes waltz across the back of his eyelids. They blur and fade to static as Sam focuses on recalling the rhythm of Dean's thumb as it flicked across the keypad.
A miniscule amount of effort has the image which envelopes his senses slowing down. As it does, he finds the flow of Dean's strong-jointed thumb mesmerising. The tendons in Dean's wrist shift faintly beneath thin blue veins that look too delicate to belong to an arm nicked with a dozen scars. Sam watches the shift of skin over the jutting bone of Dean's thumb so intently that he completely misses the numbers dialled. The replay of the memory has advanced to Dean lifting his arm to put the phone near his ear, and Sam squeezes his eyes tighter, holds on to the moment so hard that the time in his vision grinds to a stop.
Dean lashes are swept down, frozen at the peak of a blink. Those too, Sam thinks, seem out of place when he's so accustomed to the general idea of who Dean is and how Dean looks. It's startling to realise that he hardly ever really looks at his brother. Dean is poised to press the button to start the call. His lips are pursed slightly, and the freckles on his skin are far less faint than Sam remembers them to be. When he gets to them, the numbers seem huge on the phone's softly glowing screen.
Wildly, Sam wonders if he opens his eyes if everything outside will be hanging stalled, too.
But he's too afraid to find out, and then he's listening to Dean leave a message on Missouri's machine, the sound of Dean's voice somehow enough to block out the rest of the world until Sam can catch his breath.
A week later they're in the barrio of a border town and Sam can't keep still. Places like this make him nervous, not because the streets are webbed with cracks and they're the only white faces in a six block radius, but because of Dean. Thick-armed tough guys with shaved heads and short tempers are the same everywhere; he and Dean might get some slack for rolling up in the Impala, but the car only holds the attention of men like that to a point. And right now, they're busy eyeballing Dean as he's busy eyeballing the curvy girls hanging around sucking down juice popsicles in front of the little carneceria across the street.
"Dean, we're here for a reason."
"Right," Dean says, and squints up at the blaze of the sun before shoving his keys into his pocket and pointing towards the stairs tucked between a dollar store and a beauty salon. He takes the steps two at a time, the wooden railing rattling and losing flakes of paint in his wake. On the landing, a cluster of gutted candles in glass holders and small picture frames tied with coloured ribbons vie for space. Dean gestures between them and the dark face of the numberless door. "You sure you want to do this? We're two steps away from drinking chicken blood."
"Missouri said she's the one, right?"
"Still your call, Uri."
The door opens before they knock and Dean's expression does a 180 faster than a weathervane in a tornado. "Hi there," Dean says, and amps up the wattage on his smile. Sam isn't the least bit surprised to discover the face peering out at them belongs to an attractive girl roughly their age.
"I'm Dean, this is my brother Sam. We're looking for Ysenia."
When he'd been too restless to study and sick of sweater-vest laden suburbia, Sam had spent enough time stretching his legs along the streets east of the 101 to wince a little as Dean butchers the pronunciation. He smiles over Dean's shoulder anyway. "Missouri sent us."
"I know," the girl says, "she and I share some of the same gifts. It's why she sent you, remember?" Her gaze flicks to Sam but stays mostly on Dean, who smiles a little broader at the way she hangs on the door and chews on her lip. Her dark hair curls thick over her bare shoulders, and she toys with the strings of a thin cotton halter-top patterned with tiny flowers. Sam tries not to notice how enough light filters through to silhouette her body beneath it. "Did you bring the cord and the piece of liver?"
"Right here, darling," Dean says, pulling the small butcher's packet from his jacket pocket. "Sam's got the string."
She smiles as she plucks the package out of his hands and then shoves him aside with remarkable ease. She crooks a manicured finger at Sam. "You, inside. Your brother waits out here."
Sam can't help but cock an eyebrow and smirk at Dean's sulking as he inches past. He hands her the length of white satin cord. She loops it around her wrist next to a beaded rosary.
"Is it necessary, I mean, that Dean wait outside?" Sam asks once the door is shut. He tries to be discreet as he takes in the décor. Every surface is stacked with candles and cups, the walls plastered with gilt-framed pictures of saints, martyrs, and creepy, red-robed skeletons.
Ysenia unwraps the liver and crouches, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "His belief in God is not as strong as yours," she says absently, and croons when a nappy little dog comes skittering around the corner from what Sam guesses to be the kitchen.
"The liver was for the dog?"
"Even for Missouri's friends, I don't work gratis," she says, leaving the meat unwrapped on the floor. She rises and sets her hands firmly on Sam's shoulders. "Now, is it the past that you see, or things yet to come?"
"Both," Sam says, then immediately shakes his head. "Sorry, not exactly, this is hard to explain." He wishes he could sit down, wrap his hands over his knees or something to keep away the awkward want to fidget under her scrutiny. "I used to have visions, things that might happen, but they were specific, tied to people that were…like me." He swallows, stalls for a second to figure out how much to say. "But that hasn't happened since—for a while. Now it's like I've got some kind of window to the past, and sometimes a few seconds ahead."
"You touched the other side and it was not the Lord Jesus that called you back," Ysenia says, her hands moving to stroke Sam's face, rest there lightly. The rosary wound around her wrist like a bracelet clicks, the cross swaying in the edge of his field of vision. Sam's skin tingles. "Did you think the price of your brother's selfishness would rest entirely upon his shoulders?"
On the floor beside them, Ysenia's dog snuffles and licks at the waxed butcher paper, whines when there's nothing more to be had.
Sam swallows down the bitterness that rises in his throat. "What can I do?"
"Not much, I'm afraid," she answers quietly.
The cord at her wrist loosens, writhes and thickens as Sam watches, the sheen of it turning to the gleam of scales. A thin albino snake hisses at him, and he draws back as Ysenia's slender fingers clamp around his wrist and hold him firm. The snake wriggles forward, moves from her hand to his, its belly warm as it slides over his fingers. It nudges under his cuff to wind around his forearm, and Ysenia catches his chin with her other hand, forces his gaze to meet her own. Her deep brown eyes widen to white around the edges before they roll back, blossom red, veins bursting as blood leaks like tears down the contours of her face.
She blinks and Sam's head buzzes with a dozen different ways this could have gone, most of them poorly for one or the both of them. He staggers back a step, his arm aching with the sting of phantom fangs, but he can't look away from the trap of Ysenia's eyes, normal again. She wipes her face, raises up on her toes, and he leans in reflexively.
She kisses him, not on the mouth but on the rise of his cheek, and she hesitates for a heartbeat before easing down. "Know your sins, Samuel Winchester, and perhaps God will forgive you, perhaps the Blessed Virgin will help you learn your gifts."
Ysenia releases him, and when Sam looks down, a raised white scar stretches from his wrist to his elbow.
"Now get out of my house and never return."
"What happened in there?" Dean asks when Sam drops into the car and slams the door shut. Dean keys the ignition, smiles at the answering growl, and glances over while putting the car into gear.
"Honestly, I have no idea." Sam tugs his shirtsleeve down over his wrist, then thinks better of it and peels it back, showing off his forearm to Dean.
Dean hits the brake halfway into the street. A pick-up truck swerves around them, honking. "The hell is that?"
Sam gestures at the road before Dean's protective hackles can raise up and he goes and does something stupid like charging back up the stairs. "It's supposed to help."
Dean's hands flex as he shifts his grip on the wheel. His gaze flicks past Sam, but pulls back, and then he's easing into the sparse traffic like there hadn't been bloody murder in his eyes. "It better. We passed up two minor hauntings to get here fast enough for that girl to see you."
"I know." Sam cranks down the window, lets his knees splay and props his elbow on the door. "Back to Nevada then?"
Dean jams a cassette into the player and even if Sam can close his eyes and call up what had been his peripheral vision to figure out precisely how many were passed up before Dean settled on Deep Purple, things feel like they should again. "That spirit stalking that hotel isn't going to off itself," Dean says, and slides on his sunglasses before adding, "again."
Whatever had happened, Sam's shoulders feel looser, his world making a slow roll back towards something he could call normal. He hides a smile behind his fingers and looks forward to when they're on the open road again, hedged between fields that stretch for miles and miles and that skim by too fast for the details to stick.
The poltergeist turns out to be almost as dusty as the casino it haunts, but that doesn't mean it makes their job easy. By the end of day two, both Sam and Dean earned themselves their fair share of nicks and bruises, but the silver lining is that management of the Nomad is one of the rare believers. Sam supposes that with the average mortality rate of a hotel it shouldn't be as surprising as it first had seemed. For toasting the pest, they earn themselves a week on the house which includes, much to Dean's gluttonous delight, free reign of the buffet.
"So, ghostie number two is lurking in a mineshaft just over a couple hours away. With any luck we'll have its bones smoked in time to get back for dinner theatre."
Sam watches horrified as Dean scoops a few forkfuls of macaroni and cheese onto a fat slice of prime rib and folds the mess up like a taco.
"Something here isn't right."
"You say that, but you haven't even tasted it," Dean says, leaning forward so his overflowing plate will catch anything that falls. His fingers glisten with au jus in the warm light.
"I don't need to, but that's not what I meant." The job isn't done and Sam can feel it, knows in the marrow of his bones that during the hunt he saw a piece to a bigger puzzle. There's still something nasty lurking in this place and it isn't just the design on the static-hoarding carpets. His memories are like the casino floor though, too much to sift through, a labyrinthine jumble that threatens to trap him in the chaos and noise the deeper he goes.
Dean eyes him thoughtfully, wipes sauce from the corner of his mouth with his thumb. "Yeah?"
"Yeah."
Dean's head dips in a nod. He's smiling when he looks up at Sam again. His eyes gleam, wicked like a piece of broken glass, and something in Sam's stomach flips as Dean licks his fingers clean.
"Well then," he says, wiping his hand dry and tucking his napkin under the edge of his plate, "I'll start nosing around the regulars at the bar, and you can start up again with the staff."
By ten o'clock, Sam's gone through the cleaning staff, the security staff, and the kitchen staff. Not a soul on any of the shifts has noticed anything new, and the ones who know he's responsible for the lack of flying silverware end up spending all their time thanking him instead of giving him any fresh leads. The accolades would be welcome if he wasn't so sure that things weren't peachy keen like everyone believes. What really makes Sam grind his teeth though is not having anything to go on but a persistent, nagging feeling at the back of his brain.
His arm throbs, the raised white scar a line of heat under his shirtsleeve. Whatever the thing does it's been helping, otherwise Sam's pretty sure being in this place—226 slot machines, 3 elevators currently at floors 8, 5, and 16 — would drive him crazy.
In his head, he hears Dean's voice say, "Chill out, Rain Man, and stop worrying. If there's something to find, we'll find it." The real Dean however is probably dying to tell him to hit the poker tables and put his skills to good use. After all, they've only got six days left on their free ride.
Sam smiles to himself. A throng of old ladies in loud patterned blouses and big glasses shuffle out of the elevators to crowd the hallway and he slows down to edge past them. Usually the elderly seem to pack it in early, but what did he know, maybe it was grannies night out. Maybe he's overthinking things too, the days upon days of being bombarded with an excess of stimulation leaving him trying to fill in the gaps when those gaps are supposed to be there.
Finally free of the permed and perfumed mob, Sam beelines for the bar. For a second-rate casino, the place tries hard to put on the nightlife. Music slams out past a cluster of ceiling-height tropical plants and ends up in a fight to the death with the cacophony of the slots. Sam wrinkles his nose as the mishmash of sound swarms around him. He manages to put on a smile for the bouncer lurking in the entryway foliage and slips inside to where drunken chatter and the clink of glasses takes up the job of vying for supremacy with the speakers.
This isn't their usual scene, not by a long shot, but Dean is making the most of it. He's smack dab in the middle of a group of girls with lipstick as shiny as their high-heeled shoes. There's no other word than undulating for the way the scatter of dancers are moving, and the one in the glittery dress who has her arms around Dean's neck stays plastered against his front like her life depends on it.
Sam rubs his temples, but this is a familiar headache, the sort that comes from a fresh reminder that Dean frequently gets to live it up while he's the one who ends up inching past a snail-paced herd of blue-haired churchgoers.
He sighs and tries to catch Dean's attention, but it's firmly fixed on his partner's cleavage. Sam follows Dean's gaze, can't help but appreciate the sight too, but then he's backtracking, jumping up to the column of Dean's neck, pale against the dark of his tee. The girl must have just got him to agree to dance, there's no sheen of sweat on his skin, his hands practically chaste in their grip high on her waist. But he's moving with the girl in a way that's anything but pure and innocent, his hips rolling wavelike like a rodeo rider caught in slow motion, and Sam feels the pressure in his skull spike before the crash-stop-bang—
He can see it: how he could slide his arm between Dean and the girl, curl his hand over Dean's shoulder to take all of Dean's focus. A pair of tits distracts Dean easily enough, but Sam can turn up the gravity, pull Dean to him. Pull him away, pull him close, get those hips aligned to his own and feel that roll with the whole of his body. They'd slide together, move as one, hearts pounding harder than the bass, and bright eyes would go from startled to competitive until they faded into the heaviness of lust.
The scar burns like a warning and Sam clutches his forearm. This, this will be his sin.
This has always been his sin.
Sam moans, sick to his soul from a want he thought he'd packed down hard enough to forget, that he'd ignored like a phantom limb through all the miles between here and Stanford.
He slips into the crowd, winds through the push of bodies without pause, his body in synch with his mind, knowing instinctively where to go to avoid being slowed down. Sam heads for them, towards the sinuous push of their bodies. Curve of muscle, curve of lip, hard and soft, sharp and sweet, and that was just Dean. All Dean.
His arm goes between them. The pull of futures Sam shouldn't know claw at him, hungry to know life. They hook into his very being as he leans down, and stubble scrapes beneath his lips as his mouth grazes Dean's cheek.
"I'm going upstairs," Sam chokes out, when what he really wants to say is, Leave the girl. I want you. You look good enough to fuck.
It isn't until the elevator counts up the floors into double digits that he feels the thread of that potential moment slip away, too far gone now to resurrect, to go back and tug it—tug Dean—into place, too thin to follow towards crumpled sheets and kiss-bruised lips.
Staring at his reflection, Sam knows the shape of regret as it carves his mouth into its form.
Cold showers never work like they're supposed to. Sam lays shivering in the air conditioned room, his mind humming electric-current alive. He can feel the bible in the drawer beside him like another person in the room, but there have never been any answers in there for this. None he could stomach, anyway. Sorry Gideon, maybe next time.
Behind his eyelids he can see the shape of Dean's body, the movement of his spine as he had leaned back, let that girl press harder against him with the grind and push of exhibitionistic foreplay.
Sam was eleven the first time Dean brought a girl home. He'd woken up, old enough by that point to start cluing in why they had to be so careful all the time and what really lurked out there in the darkness. He'd woken up and trudged towards the living room with fear choking his heart and there was Dean, kissing some girl like people kissed in the movies, faces smooshed up together only more wet.
Sam still doesn't know why he hadn't said anything, just stood there and watched Dean talk her into taking off her shirt. Her tits were peeking out of her bra when she spotted him, clutching at his crotch even though he didn't know a thing yet about jerking off.
Dean had been so pissed when she got embarrassed and left…
"She was going to let me touch her pussy. Maybe even do it." Dean whirlwinds past, leather jacket snapping as he throws the keys to Dad's car onto the dresser. It's a little girl's dresser, painted white with purple trim, but they're so used to staying in places with rooms that they don't fit in that this time Dean had just made a face instead of complaining about it.
"I’m sorry, Dean. I’m sorry."
“Damn right you’re sorry.” Apologies don’t mean much when Dean is angry like this, it has to burn out of his system, same as Dad.
“You can kiss me if you want. I’d do it with you.”
Dean’s eyes turn into saucers. He steps back, like Sam’s grown vampire fangs or something, and his heel hits the dresser. The keys to the car fall to the floor. Neither of them really notice.
“Promise I won’t tell.” Sam says, and Dean doesn’t react. It’s just enough for Sam to figure out that telling isn’t really the problem.
“You turn into a fag on my watch and Dad’ll kill me.”
It’s something wrong with him.
Sam hadn’t really fallen asleep, but a memory that old felt remarkably like a dream, the flurry of stirred-up emotions belonging to someone other than himself. He isn’t that boy anymore, uncertain and worried about his big brother rejecting him. That boy had grown up, nearly lived his dream of normalcy, and survived the pain of having it all ripped away.
That boy had toughened up trial by fire. Hidden in the darkness, Sam pulls his mouth into a tight smile, and wonders how narrow Dean’s worldview remains. How much of that macho bullshit is tied up with the worry that someone will find out he used to moan like a slut with a cock in his mouth. And his brother’s at that.
Sam’s eyes focus on a point somewhere beyond the ceiling, and in the hush of the room he can feel Dean’s future flaking to ash as each grain disappears from the glass of his lifespan. Their future in all permutations vanishes just as swiftly.
The thing in his arm lashes its tail.
In the next room over, a baby wails. A part of Sam wonders what kind of person would bring a baby to a casino. A man like their father would, in theory, but he'd hated any place that had more than twenty rooms to rent. Crowds mean anonymity, but crowds also meant danger, collateral damage. Roadside motels that might've been the cream of the crop thirty odd years ago were often too eager for customers to ask questions.
That's ingrained in him deep enough that he still doesn't feel right laying here.
"...you never come up to the city."
Sam's hand creeps down his belly. His fingers pause at the waist of his shorts, edge of elastic softly zipzipping under the scraping edge of his thumbnail. Jess had looked so beautiful standing in the middle of that hotel room, her hair swept back into a loose tail and tiny scraps of lacy black fabric clinging to her curves. If he tried, he could relive that moment too, breathe in her scent again like she'd never died.
But Sam isn't that boy anymore either. And his dreams of marriage then had been as hollow as when he'd still been clinging to Dean's shirttails.
"I'd marry Cindy Crawford in a heartbeat."
"That's lame."
"Oh yeah, well who do you want to marry when you grow up?"
"I want to marry you."
"Shut up before Dad hears you talk like that."
Unfolding his arms from behind his head, Sam sits up, arranging himself cross-legged on the bed. He can't do this anymore, dredge up old memories vividly enough to live them all over again. They'd been hard enough to try and forget the first time around.
And it'd be so easy, too easy, to give in to devilish whispers and use his ability to lead Dean down that path again. To turn him. Dean, so easy to use, buttons laid out in a neat row ready to push.
Like TiVo, Dean had said, and Sam steels himself to search for what he needs to know. In a flash, the last few days rewind, going faster and faster until the minutes are images spinning by like cards in a Rolodex.
He pauses too late: highway rest stop, Dean coming out of the bathroom with water dripping down his face, lifting his shirt to wipe it away. There's irritation, overstimulus, but the filter Ysenia had given him clears things up, and there, under it all, Sam can feel the undercurrent. Ripple of want, curl of desire.
He groans miserably, tries again, and then he has it: rickety stairs creaking under their weight, Dean his usual warm pillar of strength nearby, and then skip-flash-blink: Ysenia, her eyes turning to blood but her mouth still moving.
This memory doesn’t stay easily, and he fights to keep the swelling darkness at bay and hold the fragments in place.
"Not thoughts that you read, Sam Winchester, it is probabilities. You are neither medium nor oracle, you are a catalyst.
"God may help you, but until He shows you the way, there is this." Her grip hardens, nails carving into his skin. Her head whips to look at him, bloodied eyes seeming to cross the span of time to see him as he is, a passenger in his own mind. “It eats some of what plagues you, but it will starve on scraps. Feed to it that what you wish to forget."
The swim back to the present leaves Sam drained, his body trembling with exhaustion. Sweat dampens his hair, curled strands sticking to his cheeks. The devourer in his arm writhes, the scar twisting along his flesh. Its hunger spreads like poison in his blood.
On the surface his arm resembles a suicide gone wrong. And that's what it is, Sam thinks, running his fingers from wrist to elbow. He's held on to his sins for so long he's been killing himself for them. He only has glimpses of what could be, not what could have been, but the questions are there. Would Jess have lived? Dad? Would Dean be whole if he hadn’t selfishly run off for greener pastures? If he’d not pressed and pressed until his own brother had given in to his sick wants? Gorge rises in his throat.
Know your sins.
He has too many to count.
Shaking and fevered Sam closes his eyes and opens his mind, pours everything he wishes he wasn't into that hungry mouth hidden beneath his skin.
He's losing moments, dozens of them, but the cost of keeping them feels too dear.
Sam knows focus, knows relief, knows for the first time how heavy the burden of guilt had been. There's no wildfire flash of jealousy to go with the embarrassment when Dean stumbles in at a quarter past three smelling like sex and booze.
And if something in him triggers when Dean shucks off his pants and stands silhouetted in the light of the bathroom, well, he doesn't need to hold onto that.
[on to part two...]
awake