rivers_bend

Title: He's not heavy
Words: 1200
Rating: Teen (PG-13) for themes
Characters: Dean and Sam (implied Sam/Dean)
Spoilers: non-specific
Disclaimer: Our porn makes more people watch your show.
Summary: The room at Dean's back looked like it had hosted the apocalypse.
A/N: Thank you to sylvanwitch for pre-read and squee.

So, even after the story ended, these boys wouldn't stop talking to me. This is an epilogue to Powerverse. Follows directly on from Battle




Dean carried the bodies out back, dug a pit, and used the splintered door and broken floorboards as kindling. He could have gone back inside once it was lit, where Ellen and Sam and Bobby slumped, exhausted and drinking whiskey straight from a bottle, but he watched the fire instead, for hours, until Ruby and the other demon were nothing but a blackened hole in the desert. He heard Sam come to the empty doorway three times, even heard everything he didn't say, but Dean never turned to look at him. Just watched.

It smelled, he was sure, like hell.

The sun was full up by the time he trickled the last shovelful of sandy soil over the charred remains. There were two tumbleweeds in the distance, racing the way a teenaged girl might race a boy she liked, pushing ahead one moment and then dropping behind, wanting to boost his ego, or else wanting to be caught. Millicent Bledsoe had run with him like that on the field of some school in some state he couldn't even remember. But he remembered her name, and the fact that she had skin like dark honey and hair that wrapped itself around his fingers. She tasted like Wrigley's gum and laughed in delight when he kissed her. He got home that night, bursting with the sound of that giggle, and Dad was already packing the car. Dean couldn't remember now where they'd gone next, but he remembered that Sam had slept with his head in Dean's lap the whole way.

When Dean went back inside, the other three had gone to bed. Jack and Jim lay empty on the kitchen table, almost touching, but not quite, like the boy from Tennessee and the boy from Kentucky were trying not to give in to temptation.

Dean rubbed his eyes. Fuck, he was a lot tireder than he thought if he was giving whiskey bottles repressed homosexual sex lives. Still. The others might have left him some. Then he saw they had, another bottle of Jack, half-empty on the counter. He took a slug and couldn't separate the liquor burn from the smoke-raw pain in his throat. It tasted of nothing and went down like water.

The room at his back looked like it had hosted the apocalypse, so Dean kept his eyes on the kitchen sink, which was no more stained and pitted than when he and Sam had walked in a lifetime ago and ate soup and grilled cheese. He thought about grilled cheese for a while, the greasy slickness it left on your tongue, the way it could burn the skin right off the roof of your mouth if you weren't careful, the way Sam always insisted they were cut on the diagonal, and how hard it was to cook them just right on a hotplate, but Sam would beg and beg until Dean agreed to make them.

Dean wondered what it would be like to eat a grilled cheese sandwich. He couldn't imagine eating anything at all, so he upended the bottle and tipped the last of the Jack down his throat. He never heard Sam sneak up behind him.

The arms sliding around his waist made Dean start and chip another piece of enamel off the edge of the sink with the bottom of the liquor bottle. Sam smelled clean and good and totally wrong, like he'd stepped out of another world that Dean only remembered in the way he remembered having seen Terminator 2 in a movie theater. He knew it had happened, but the details were fuzzy and overlaid with having seen the movie so often on TV since. Anything that didn't smell of burning didn't belong.

"There's more hot water," Sam said as he prized the empty from Dean's fist. "Soap, shampoo, clean towels. It's like nothing you've ever felt before."

"Don't," Dean said. He meant, Don't touch me like that, your hands fitting the curve of my hipbones, your chest along my back. Don't touch me like you want me. I'm your brother. You slept with your head on my lap and cried if I didn't make you grilled cheese sandwiches cut into triangles. But it came out all wrong. He was tipping his head back, brushing his forehead against Sam's neck, shifting just a little so Sam's hips cupped his ass and he could relax into those arms. It sounded like Don't stop.

"I can't believe—" Sam said, and inhaled like all the air in the room wasn't enough to fill his lungs. "I…"

Dean didn't have an answer.

Sam walked Dean past the destruction like it wasn't there—like it didn't matter—and stripped off his clothes while the shower got hot. He put Dean under the spray, turning and shifting him when Dean just stood there. There was wet and there was warm and Sam was right. It was like nothing Dean had ever felt. It felt like nothing.

Dean watched as wet patches spread up Sam's sleeves, and then as Sam pulled off his own shirts. Bruises covered Sam's torso, glowing just beneath the skin, and Dean imagined that he was the only one who could see them yet. Like it was he who had the third eye, not his baby brother. Sam cocked his head to the side and then pushed off his jeans, stepping out of them and his unlaced boots all at once so he could climb into the shower stall with his brother.

Hands. God, those hands that could wrap around a shotgun, dwarf the business end of a Louisville Slugger, that were strong enough to do things Dean didn't even want to think about, they were so gentle on his head. Fingers massaged shampoo into his scalp, getting at the places where the tension sat. Behind his ears, just at the base of his skull, along his hairline. Sam pulled Dean close, tipped his head forward so it rested against Sam's sternum, and he rubbed. And it felt… It felt divine.

The hot water hit right between Dean's shoulder blades and ran down over his ass and thighs. With a thumb on either side of Dean's forehead, Sam tilted him back until the water rinsed away the shampoo instead. Dean kept his eyes closed. When his hair was clean, Sam turned him, let the water hit his chest, and he began to soap Dean all over. There was no hint of seduction, just tender efficiency.

Dean sniffed. Tried to fill his nostrils with the decay and ash, the smell of hell he was supposed to be surrounded with, but it was gone. There was only clean and Sam.

"She didn't take me," Dean said. Asked. Because he wanted it to be true, but he wasn't sure.

"She couldn't take you," Sam answered. "You belong to me. With me. You're—" Sam's arms went around him then and pulled him close until there was nothing but a sheen of water, one molecule thick, separating them. "You belong to you," Sam was whispering now, "but here, with me. Please, Dean. With me."

Sam was his brother, and he was naked, and crying, and there was nothing Dean could do except return his embrace.