rivers_bend

Title: I count your eyelashes
Pairing: Sam/Dean (references to Sam/Jess)
Words: ~4500
Rating: Adult
For bentile in the spn_j2_xmas fic exchange. I tried for: Sam/Dean: licking their wounds after a hunt. Taking care of each other, slow, soft, needy sex + reassurance/reconnecting, could be part of a casefile fic, I hope this works for you!



"Woof, woof, woof!" Dean says, and then he whines and paws at Sam's arm.

Sam tries a glare with raised eyebrows, but all that gets him is a double whine and more barking, so he says, "Dean, what the hell?"

"Timmy fell down the well."

Of course. "What?"

"Jesus, Sam, haven't you ever seen Lassie?" Dean's mixing indignant with wide-eyed innocence again and looks a little like the Disney princess on the bus stop billboard across the street. Not that Sam's going to tell him that.

"Not since I was, like, six, no." Sam gets that Lassie was a dog, but he's still not understanding why Dean was barking at him.

"Never mind." Dean taps the paper he's pulled out of the library's printer and drops it on the table in front of Sam. "Think we've got a case."

Los Altos, CA: Timothy Martin, age 26, fell to his death on August 12th. Martin, a resident of Walnut Creek, fell into a disused well while hiking in Palo Alto Foothills Park. His death was the third such death at the location, despite safety measures in place to prevent accidents. Three other hikers heard his screams for help, but were too late. Although Martin was found beneath the iron grille and the wooden cover over the well, suicide is considered unlikely. Police found no evidence of sabotage to the well's coverings. Barring further evidence, police have ruled Martin's death an accident.

"Do we investigate bad well covers?" Sam hopes not. He and Jess used to go hiking in Foothills Park, and he doesn't really want to go back there.

"No, but we do investigate water spirits snatching hikers in broad daylight."

Dean's right about that. And they've been looking for a new hunt for almost two hours now, at computer stations built for children, as far as Sam can tell. His back is killing him.

"Fifteen hour drive, at least," Sam says, knowing Dean will hear it as acceptance and not the further complaint it is.

"Put new tires on her the other day. Thirteen thirty, at most." Dean's shoving pens and notebooks into Sam's bag, obviously just as ready to get out of the library as Sam is.

They've missed checkout by several hours, so Dean decides they should spend the night here and start first thing in the morning. He neglects to mention that first thing means five am.

"I hate you, you know that, right?" Sam grumbles when he opens his eyes to find Dean standing over him, naked, with a toothbrush sticking out of his mouth and a damp towel cocked for a second snap at Sam's thigh—in case the first sharp sting didn't work, presumably.

"You love me," Dean counters, dribbling foam down his chin.

Sam doesn't bother with an answer. Bastard has a swelled enough head as it is, and Sam's a shit liar first thing in the morning.

By the time Sam's out of the shower, Dean is dressed and taking the bags out to the car. Just as well, if he's wanting to get out of here any time soon. It seems Sam's lack of enthusiasm about going back to California has made him horny.

Or maybe it was waking up face to face with Dean's dick.

They make good time as far as San Jose, but a four-car accident on 280 stalls them, so it's after six by the time they get to the park. With the change to Pacific time, Sam calculates it took fourteen hours and seven minutes. He wishes he'd gone ahead and bet Dean the two months of laundry duty he was considering.

"Traffic," Dean says before Sam can even open his mouth. "Totally doesn't count."

"Uh huh."

Dean ignores that and says, "Park closes at sunset; gives us half an hour or so, or else stay after closing. What do you think?"

Sam and Jess had gotten distracted one evening and ended up a mile or so from the car after it got dark. They'd used the mini-flashlight on Sam's keys and the display on Jess' phone to find their way back to the parking lot. That gate had been easy to climb, but they'd narrowly escaped having the car locked in. Of course, this time, Sam could pick the gate's padlock without having to explain things he'd rather not explain, but still, "Dark is dark up here, and the well could be anywhere. Better to try to find out more and come back tomorrow," he says.

There's no answer from Dean, who seems lost watching a couple wrangling three dogs into the back of an SUV.

"Dean?" Sam asks after a few minutes watching his brother's jaw work like he's thinking about saying something.

"That could be—" he starts, then, "Never mind. I'm starving. What's for dinner?"

They head north, away from the traffic jam, and find a taqueria and a vacancy sign in the maze of suburbs several miles from anywhere Sam got familiar with while he was in school.

After they eat, Dean calls around trying to get more information from the cops, and Sam makes use of the room's free Wi-Fi. The cops are a bust—Dean managed to get a detective who insisted on checking Dean's fake badge number before he'd give up the goods—but Sam finds a blog with grainy cell-phone video of the first officers on the scene putting up the police-line tape, and he recognizes enough landmarks to give him a good idea of where in the park they need to look.

"So you went there a lot?" Dean asks, when Sam tells him they're good to go.

"What's a lot? Not like every week or anything."

"The sign said they have cable, here, right?" Dean turns towards the TV and picks up the remote, settling in the middle of the room's small sofa so there is no room for Sam to sit with him.

"It's after ten in Arizona," Sam says over the sound of a laugh track, "late enough we could go to bed, if you want."

"Go ahead, if you're tired," Dean answers, turning the TV down a notch.

No point saying, "I meant we could go to bed," when Dean's in this kind of mood, so Sam gets in bed on his own and watches TV over Dean's shoulder until eventually he falls asleep.

When Sam wakes up, Dean's gone, but the other bed has been slept in. Who-sleeps-where arrangements are not something they've talked about, but although they always get two queens, it's the first time in nearly three months they've slept in separate beds. Sam's been waiting for it, though, and he's mostly just surprised Dean didn't demand some space earlier. What he can't figure out is what happened between the drive from Arizona—where Dean was casting hot glances his way, groping Sam's knee, and fondling the hair at the back of his neck—and last night, when Dean seems to have decided that Sam isn't even for looking at, never mind touching.

The door opens, bringing in the smell of coffee and sugar, while Sam's pulling his shirt over his head.

"Jesus, Sam, the bakery up the street. I almost bought the whole place. Hope you're hungry." Dean's carrying three bakery bags and a cardboard tray with two tall coffees. Sam decides that it's a good thing they're brothers, or he might embarrass himself asking Dean to marry him right here and now.

Clearly the coffee fumes have gone to his head.

"Starving," he says.

"Well, no taking more than your share. I'm armed." Dean drops the bags on the coffee table and plucks a coffee stirrer out of the tray, brandishing it menacingly. Well, it might be menacing if it were a knife and not a thin strip of plastic.

When he sits himself down, Sam leaves room for Dean next to him, room that Dean takes with his usual sprawl, thwacking the back of Sam's hand when Sam reaches for one of the bags. "That one's mine. You get the bran muffin," Dean says with a particularly evil grin.

Sam shoves him and they bicker back and forth about who needs the bran muffin more, but when Dean finally rips the bags open, flattening them into makeshift plates, there are two croissants, two cheese and two apple Danish, a blueberry muffin, and a lemon poppyseed one. Sam laughs out loud. Apparently Dean wasn't kidding when he said he hoped Sam was hungry. They don't even touch the Danish, so Dean wraps them up and they take them in the car to eat later.

Dean gets a little weird again when Sam leads them right to the abandoned well, but not enough that Sam feels the need to say anything. There's a tatter of crime tape hanging from an old fencepost and a large, freshly painted warning sign. KEEP BACK, it says in red letters, and then smaller, underneath, dangerous well. There's no one around.

The EMF meter goes crazy as soon as Dean turns it on, though they're at least twenty feet from the iron grille mentioned in the newspaper. "Still think this isn't our kind of thing, Sammy?"

"You were right, I was wrong." Sam gets the smile he was hoping for with that.

They fight for a while about who is going to get closer, neither willing to let his brother risk getting sucked under the cover, and eventually go together. Once Dean turns off the EMF, the only sound is an angry blue jay protesting their presence, and then suddenly, Dean is flat on his back being dragged feet-first towards the well.

"Sam," he shouts, but Sam's already diving for him, catching him under the arms, trying to dig into the dry grass with his knees. Whatever has his brother is strong.

As they get closer, Sam sees the cover sliding off the well's mouth, pushing out the other side of the open grille, which is set about ten inches off the ground on four short legs. If the victims got pulled under that, Sam reckons they were glad they drowned shortly afterwards. No way you kept all your skin doing that.

He's managed to slow Dean's progress towards the grate enough that Dean can get his foot up on the edge of it and give them more leverage, and Sam manages to hook one leg around the fence which runs between the path and the clearing where the well is. Even with the extra help, there's a minute where Sam is sure he's going to lose his brother anyway, and panic gives him the strength to jerk Dean to the side.

He doesn't know if it's that, or if they just get lucky, but suddenly whatever has Dean lets him go. They waste no time scrabbling back to the other side of the rise.

"Fuck," Sam says.

"Fuck," Dean agrees.

"Not an accident."

"No."

"We need a plan."

"Yes."

They head back to the car, where Dean stuffs a whole Danish in his mouth, holding out the bag to Sam, who takes a deep breath and digs in. Grease and sugar consumed, they go back to the motel to get the laptop, and then find a library.

Three hours later, and they've decided it's probably not the summer's first victim, whose body was recovered quickly and then cremated, and there is nothing in the history of the park that screams haunting. John's journal confirms that water wraiths are more with the luring and less with the dragging.

"Did you check missing persons yet?" Dean asks, rubbing a hand through his hair.

"No. I'm a total idiot."

"No need to be sarcastic, just asking."

"I wasn't. I'm an idiot. Didn't even think about it." Sam's been having trouble switching into research mode from Save-Dean-Now mode today.

After coming up with too many contenders on their first look, they focus on people who disappeared in the two months before the first incident at the well. Dean's favorites are a Spanish bioengineering grad student from Stanford who was last seen walking home from a night class, and a nursery school teacher from Menlo Park.

"Why them?" Sam wants to know.

"Felt like a woman," Dean answers. "And the student was on the water polo team, so she'd have lots of upper body strength. The teacher was an avid hiker," he points at one of the articles he found on her disappearance, "so maybe she had an accident in the park, was never found."

"So now what?"

"Food."

Over lunch, they decide they need to talk to the victims' friends and family. By unspoken agreement they go to the teacher's house first. Her husband's not home, but a nosey neighbor is happy to tell them all about the affair Mrs. Billings was having, how she'd come home late at night and sometimes not at all. "Husband only called the police because he didn't want his family to know his wife ran off with another man. Useless waste of space, he is, and ugly as a rainy Sunday. She's better off without him."

"Sounds like it," Sam agrees, and thanks her for her time.

"So," Dean says, when they're back in the car, "what's behind door number two?"

Sam looks at the address Dean wrote down and realizes that it's less than two blocks from the apartment that he shared with Jess. Fuck he thinks, and waits for the sick feeling to come. But when he actually imagines seeing it all again, Dean's right there with him, and it isn't as painful anymore to think about the life he had.

Or it wouldn't be if Dean hadn't started bristling as soon as he recognized the neighborhood. "It's fine, Dean," Sam says softly.

Dean acts like he doesn't hear, but his jaw sets and his knuckles go white on the steering wheel.

Another block, and Dean says, "You remember our cover story?" like they haven't done this a hundred times in the last year and a half.

You remember I'm your brother and not some asshole hitchhiker you picked up? Sam doesn't say. Then, "This is it, on the left."

The roommate never questions that Anna's parents might have hired a pair of investigators to look into her disappearance. "Hope you do better than the police," is all she says about it. She's sublet Anna's room—can't afford the rent on her own—but still has her friend's stuff in boxes in the garage. She's happy to leave Sam and Dean alone to look through it.

"D'you wish you'd stayed?" Dean asks, near whisper breaking the silence, when they've leafed through two boxes of notes on chemical engineering and are starting on a box of stuffed animals and cushions.

"No." Sam doesn't hesitate. "Wish things were different; Jess didn’t have to die, but no."

"You should have—" Dean stops and stares at a bundle of papers he pulled out of a heart-shaped pillow with "Hug Me" embroidered across it. "Guessing the cops didn't do a very thorough search of her room."

They're letters, written on steno paper, the kind with perforations at the top so you can pull out pages without getting all the tattered bits from the spiral binding. Dean reads the first one quickly and passes it to Sam.

I love you, I need you, I want you—they are exactly the type of thing you'd expect to find in a hug-me pillow on first glance. But sentences like, I saw you talking to Tarek after class last night, and You ate lunch with Richard again. You can't do this to me, turn them into something that seems more appropriate to a police file somewhere. The threats get more blatant as they move down the pile.

"Looks like our girl had herself a stalker," Dean says when he's read the last one. "A mystery stalker." All the letters are signed with a lopsided heart, but no name.

"Time to talk to the roommate, again."

Tracy doesn't have a lot to tell them. Anna had a fiancé back in Spain who she was very happy with. Tracy met him once; he spoke very little English, but seemed nice. He has an important job, Tracy can't remember what, and gets very little time off, which is why he's only been to California once in the two years Anna has been here. He doesn't sound much like their guy.

Other than him, Anna didn't have many male friends. Guys she knew from class—chemical engineering is still pretty male-dominated, Tracy points out—but outside class she mostly hung out with the water polo girls. No part-time job, just TAing, nice professors, Tracy's had them all.

"And she never mentioned any other guy? Someone sending her letters, maybe?" Sam asks.

"Not that she mentioned to me. We were friends, but she was a pretty private person, too."

Sam and Dean leave after a few more questions which don't give them any more information. The sun is setting, and Sam can see the silhouette of his old apartment building against the sky. Dean catches him looking.

"I bet they'd take you back, if you explained," Dean says.

"What?"

"You were good, right? And your girlfriend died. The admissions people, or whoever. I bet they'd let you back in." Dean's looking down at his feet like he needs to memorize his shoelaces. "You could finish up, go to law school like you want. You don't have to stay because you feel sorry for me or something. I can always call if there's any word from Dad. "

All at once, Sam gets Dean's mood. "You're an idiot," he says, and pulls Dean towards the pocket park across the street. Just a half an empty lot, with trees and grass and a couple of picnic benches; it's mostly screened from the street by bushes. There are several in the surrounding neighborhoods, but Sam always thought of this one as his park.

"Dude, what the—" Dean protests, but Sam pulls him through the gap in the hedge and pushes him up against the tree just inside.

"Shut up." There's surprise and a hint of confusion in Dean's eyes, but Sam can't see it for long because he's too close, kissing Dean hard.

"Sam," Dean gasps when Sam releases him for a second to snatch a breath and shift to press against his brother more fully, but whatever else he tries to say is lost in Sam's mouth.

Dean is solid underneath him in a way Sam doesn't usually take the time to feel. Shoulders, strong and broad, arms muscled from years of work, not hours spent in a gym. Rib cage perfect fit for Sam's hands. Hips narrower, lithe, and flexible, Sam knows from experience, though there's no clue to that now, Dean propped against the trunk of an oak, straddling nothing broader than his brother's thigh. Dean feels right. Even here with so many memories of life without Dean.

When Dean clutches at his back to pull him impossibly closer and starts rutting against Sam's thigh, Sam shifts to get a hand between them, into Dean's jeans, practiced-perfect pressure. They move in concert: shuffle of feet until Dean has one leg hooked low around Sam's hip, the other foot heel-hard against the tree, push-pull rhythm into Sam's palm; Dean's head tips back giving Sam room to bite and suck at his throat; fingers hook in Sam's belt and twist in his hair, holding him. It's not just three months of sex that's gone into the dance, but a lifetime of knowing each other's moves.

"You're crazy," Sam breathes into the cup of Dean's collar bone, "and stupid, if you think I want anything less than this." Sinks his teeth into the muscle he was just nosing, frustrated anger as well as heat.

"Ow, fuck," Dean hisses, his leg hooking tighter over Sam's ass and his rhythm stuttering for a moment. "That hurt."

"You paying attention?" Sam licks the mark, feels the dents with his tongue. "We both know you're not stupid. So stop acting like it."

"But—"

Stubborn bastard. But Sam shuts him up with a thumb pressed hard just under his crown, where it makes him groan, and a kiss that keeps him too busy to think, never mind talk.

Sam feels it when Dean breaks—stops caring that wanting Sam like this makes him selfish, and just wants, hard, hot, gasping need, wrapping around Sam and pulling him in.

"Yes,” Sam whispers against Dean's mouth, meaning more than the limbs wrapped around him and the feeling of Dean throbbing in his hand. "I've got you."

Dean slumps afterwards, held up only by Sam's chest against his and the tree trunk at his back, panting breaths turning into a chuckle as he lowers the leg hooked on Sam's hip to the ground.

"Don't you go thinking this makes me the chick," he says, and Sam thinks he means coming with a leg wrapped around his brother's waist. But then he pushes Sam away, just far enough to drop to his knees.

Sam flashes back: Jess did this once, two in the morning, walking back home from a bar, only Sam was up against the tree that time and soft when she took him into her mouth. Not like now, so close to coming he almost spills on Dean's lips before he gets a chance to feel the wet sucking heat.

There's a flash of guilt, the worry that this is sullying Jess' memory, but Dean's thumb strokes the dip where Sam's abs fade to hipbone, and Sam's back, here and now, room to hold what was in what is. His hands settle in his brother's hair, soft spikes that his fingers know the texture of even when Dean's across the room and Sam's only looking.

"Definitely not a girl," Sam says as Dean looks up, eyes glinting in the last of the sun's rays.

Dean hums amusement around Sam's cock, recovering just in time to swallow when the vibrations make Sam jerk his hips and come.

They're both tucking themselves back in when a dog barks from the gap in the hedges, heralding a stooped man in glasses and a faded black rain coat. "Ev'nin'," he says, nodding, and Sam and Dean nod back, stifling laughter at the near miss. They let it out once they're back in the car, laughing until Sam feels the ache of it in his stomach, until the tension between them is gone.

"Thank god you got your junk put away before that yappy little thing got it," Sam says as Dean turns the key in the ignition.

"Do not even joke about that, man. Not funny." But Dean's laughing again, belying his words.

Sam feels loose-limbed relief as he settles back against the passenger seat and lets Dean take them back to the hotel. He lets the twang of Misty Mountain Hop wash over him and closes his eyes.

"What do you think?" Dean asks, interrupting Going to California, and Sam wonders idly if that was on purpose. "Is Anna our ghost?"

He turns down the radio's volume. "Can't know for sure, but there's a lot pointing in that direction." It feels right, and Sam has learned to listen to his instincts.

"Grabbed by her stalker? Body dumped in the well?" Dean glances at Sam. "Now she's trying to get her revenge on any guy who gets close enough?"

"They lowered a diver to get the hikers out?" Sam asks. Dean was in charge of rescue details.

"I'm a rescue worker, you lower me down that well, I'm gonna hook a rope around the first thing I see that looks like a body and give the signal. Not dive down and see what else is down there. Makes sense they wouldn't'a found her."

Sam figures Dean's probably right. Just because he would want to know what was pulling people into the well, doesn't mean your average Joe is going to wonder. "So what do we do? Drop a bag of rock salt and a kerosene bomb down there and hope we're right?"

"Then her family never knows what happened. Better if the cops find her. Maybe they can catch who did it, and she can rest in peace."

"And how do we do that, without the cops catching us, too?" Sam has no interest in going to jail.

"We'll think of something."

~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Just after ten in the morning, on the seventh of September, Louis, the mail clerk, tosses a pile of letters onto Detective Hannigan's desk. Boring, boring, boring, until he gets to a large brown envelope with the address typed in capital letters. "This been through X-ray and the chemical sniffers?" Hannigan calls after the boy.

"Course it has," the kid says, dry as sand, rolling his eyes.

The detective takes out the Swiss Army Knife his father gave him for his thirteenth birthday and slits open the manila envelope. Nothing but a pile of papers inside. A stack of steno pages torn out of a notebook, and a typed letter, addressed to him.

Detective Hannigan,
I understand you are looking into the disappearance of Anna Lopez. These letters might help. And you might want to look in the well in Foothills park before anyone else has an accident there.

Good luck,

A Friend

"Jesus," he says to the room at large. "Everyone's a detective these days." He reads the letters on the steno pages though—handwritten, addressed to Anna, signed with a heart. And he wonders why he's never seen them before. By two o'clock, he has a crime scene crew up at the old well in the park. When they come back with a plastic garbage bag filled with souped flesh and bones, his gut tells him it's his missing student two days before the lab confirms it.

The envelope and typed letter are dead ends; no fingerprints, no DNA, paper and ink too common to trace, and the only clue on the steno pages is the writing, which is only useful if they find something to compare it to. They get samples from every male Stanford student who ever had a class with Anna, but there are no matches. In the mean time, more missing persons cases get added to Detective Hannigan's pile. When the coroner is done with it, Anna's body is cremated at her parents' request, and they come and take her home.

For three months, the trail gets colder, and then the bullpen sends a biochem grad student from Stanford up to see Detective Hannigan. He recognizes the letters she hands him right away.

"This creep won't leave me alone," she says. "I met him one night at a bar, and now he follows me to class, to work, everywhere, and he keeps leaving me these letters.

The smile on Hannigan's face when he asks her to sit down is more genuine than any he's had in months.