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SPN, NC-17. See warnings in previous post.
Of course there was nothing in Sam’s books or in the databases he used. He didn’t even think Dean’s eager assistance would have helped, because what he had was a lot of information about incubi and succubi, a little bit of information about non-European variants, and practically zip on invisible sexual attackers. Everything he found turned out to be about that old movie with Barbara Hershey. Even if he took that story as gospel, it offered no solutions, only desperation.
He kept seeing last night in his mind’s eye: Dean splayed out, ready for the taking. Unable to see what was coming, required to go along with whatever happened. Because the entity was invisible, Sam thought, it seemed more like a fantasy. A demon lover, a force making Dean do only what he’d really wanted all along.
At the time, he’d been too terrified and awkward to think about the image. But now, when he remembered watching, remembered his hands passing right over Dean’s body, it felt like he had been alone with Dean.
The only refuge was in brainstorming solutions. If he fixed the problem, he wouldn’t have to worry about Dean’s all-too-visible sex life any more.
Dinner was near-silent. Sam brought a notebook with him, and he spent most of the meal sketching and scratching out various seals to draw around Dean. In general, the less you knew about what you were trying to keep out, the more diffuse the protections would be. He’d need the magical equivalent of a nuclear power plant to make his current ideas more than a momentary nuisance to any focused malicious entity. Staring down at his best attempt, he frowned and rubbed his temples, where the headache had settled in hours ago and seemed ready to start redecorating.
“You’re freaking out the civilians,” Dean said. “You think you could try something besides your death glare?”
He brought his head up, but Dean was already smiling over at the waitress, gesturing at his water glass. She gave him a little I’ll-be-right-there wave, and he nodded and winked. Sam thought Dean was on autopilot; he probably didn’t even notice he was flirting.
“So, I thought we’d head on over to that poltergeist in Springfield tomorrow,” Dean said deliberately, lacing his fingers together and resting his hands on the edge of the table.
Sam blinked slowly, then forced his jaw to unclench. He looked down at his tepid steak, carrot coins and mashed potatoes. He remembered that the plate had arrived steaming. He forced himself to release the pen and pick up the fork.
Dad had always made them eat unless they were so sick that it would just come right back up. At Stanford, he’d used his freedom to skip meals at will, sometimes eating only one meal every twenty-four hours. Now, he couldn’t afford the luxury of nearly passing out from hunger and then stuffing himself until he reached food coma. He opened his mouth and took a bite. The meat would have been fine if it had been hot, and the potatoes were grainy and peppery. The carrots were gelatinous but still tasted like vegetables.
Sam chewed his way through the food while Dean took the waitress’s recommendation and ordered himself a slice of Boston cream pie. As long as it had sugar and whipped cream, Dean didn’t care about the other ingredients. He ate with apparent enjoyment.
****
The previous attacks had occurred after midnight, but they were still back in the room by nine o’clock. Sam wanted plenty of time to prep. Beyond the usual salt lines, beyond the devil’s traps, he festooned the room with every protective charm and sigil he knew. The motel was going to need to replace the carpets and repaint the walls. He invoked protection from four deities and three supernatural guardians. He burned incense that was supposed to make the invisible manifest. Dean choked theatrically and then had to jump frantically on the bed to disable the smoke alarm. The motel might also need to invest in fumigation.
After the preliminaries were complete, Sam laid out his weapons just in case any of his attempts worked. Then he rearranged the order, and decided to hide a couple in handy spots. Ordinarily, Dean would have offered color commentary. His silence made the knot in Sam’s stomach tighten further.
Dean worked on his in-progress EMF detector, the one that was going to be housed in a video iPod, for about fifteen minutes before throwing his pliers across the room, embedding the nose in the soft plaster above the television.
“It’s going to be fine,” Sam said, his voice almost steady.
Dean’s sneer in response threatened hot death. He stood, his hands flexing at his sides. “Yeah, that’s why we’ve been walking around like I’m heading to the electric chair.”
Well, excuse the fuck out of me for being upset, Sam thought. He took a deep breath. “We still don’t know what it wants.” Dean opened his mouth, and Sam continued, “We don’t know if it’s going to—escalate.”
“Three nights, that’s a pattern,” Dean said.
“So you’re okay with that?” Sam asked. The question came out flatter than he’d meant it, almost like he was asking seriously.
Dean stalked over to the television and rested one hand on it. “I’m not doing a happy dance, Sam. But this, this is worse.”
Eventually Dean sighed, pulled the pliers free from the wall, and returned to his seat to clean up his electronics.
After that, Dean fidgeted, alternately playing with his knives and scanning the TV for something he deemed worth watching. Food Channel: No. Discovery Channel: Yes, for three minutes at a time. Sam kept scratching at his arms and legs, tiny itches fooling him into searching for ants or spiders that didn’t exist.
About fifteen minutes after midnight, it began. Dean, who’d been pacing like a caged mountain lion, gave a surprised huff and pitched backwards on the bed, just as if he’d been thrown flat by an angry ghost. Sam began chanting as Dean’s overshirt twitched and rustled. Instead of ripping it open as it had the previous night, the entity slipped the buttons open one by one, then pushed the shirt off his shoulders. The demon-thing went for his belt next, popping it open and then pulling Dean’s zipper down so fast that Sam would have feared for his brother’s safety even if it had just been a woman doing it.
Dean’s eyes scanned back and forth as if there were something there to see. “Not that this ain’t flattering, sweetheart, but you’re really not my type,” he said. A stranger would have thought that Dean’s drawl was relaxed, but Sam heard the golden thread of anger in it.
Dean grunted in surprise as his jeans wrestled themselves down his hips, just as Sam blew a handful of spell powder over him. It drifted gently down onto Dean’s body, encountering no obstacle, coating his stomach and the T-shirt that was being shoved up to his armpits. Dean sneezed and cursed, pushing at his attacker. Then Dean seemed to be squeezing the thing’s tits, his expression going from pissed-off to interested and pissed-off.
“Any more bright ideas?” Dean asked as he did something that might have been rolling a nipple between his thumb and his index finger.
Sam checked the cheat sheet of rituals he’d left on the bedside table. He started again, this time in Romanian. He was basically just trusting that intent would trump pronunciation; that always worked with Latin. Dean grunted, and Sam lost his place in the ritual. Dean’s cock was hard, and curved towards his stomach in a way that looked—that was what it must look like when he was fucking someone, Sam realized. When he was inside a woman. Sam made his mouth restart the words of banishment.
Every nerve was sparking, fear-energy crackling through him until he felt as charged-up as a plasma lamp. Dean was thrusting up, mumbling to himself as he worked one hand in the air above his dick, like he was almost jacking himself off but was too ashamed to close that last inch.
His back was arching, curling him up off the bed; his other hand stroked the air beside his hip. Sam could imagine an invisible leg, wrapped around him.
Sam’s words stumbled to a halt just as Dean thrust up one last time and cursed, coming in thin jets that splashed unhindered onto his stomach. That was bizarre, but magic’s rules were always bizarre, and Sam shouldn’t be staring at the way the white streaks spattered onto Dean’s abs and pooled in the dip of his belly button and ran down over his hips and into the creases where his thighs joined his torso.
Sam swallowed and tried to find something safer to look at, and his eyes dropped to the scar at the front of Dean’s right thigh, long and thick, cross-hatched with white keloids from what must have been impromptu field surgery. It looked like a cartoon drawing of a gaping mouth. Dean had gotten that while Sam was at Stanford. It was no uglier than the carnations on Dean’s chest and back from his gunshot wounds, but Sam wondered now why he had never asked about it. Wondered how Dean could stand getting so torn up when the world didn’t know and didn’t care what he sacrificed.
It was all mixed up, sex and failure and the desire to do clean violence to something evil; Sam needed to put his hands on something, but there was nothing safe within reach. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe it all out, shut it down until he was more than a mess of hate-filled blood and bone.
Dean cleared his throat. “You want to clean this shit up—” his handwave encompassed all the extra ritual paraphernalia in the room—“or wait for morning?”
“Morning, I guess,” Sam said. “I’m gonna—” He headed for the bathroom, planning to wash his hands and maybe his face. His mind was as empty as a new-dug grave.
While he was still washing the last traces of the spell powder off of his forearms, he heard Dean’s shout of surprise.
He charged back out. Dean was on his hands and knees on the bed. Dean’s head bowed down and his shoulders strained as he tried to crawl forwards, but failed. His knees were spread far apart, and—
Sam skidded to a halt. It was just so strange. Dean’s ass was up in the air, and his hole was stretched wide, the flesh quivering with movement, but there was nothing there. It was like seeing a fakir with incredible control over usually autonomic body functions, except performing a sex show. It was so bizarre that it took him a few seconds to process what was actually happening. Then it wasn’t befuddlement but rage that held him pinned.
Dean’s hands and knees slipped on the sheets every time he tried to pull away.
If he couldn’t get the thing off Dean—
Sam grabbed Dean’s wrists, not thinking of anything beyond the need to get Dean free. He braced one foot on the side of the bed and one on the floor, pulling with every fiber of muscle. Dean’s face blurred in Sam’s vision, just a flash of the whites of his eyes. Dean grabbed on to Sam’s upper arms and his shoulders extended as he was pulled inexorably back. His fingers skidded along Sam’s skin until they lost their purchase.
Dean was panting now, each breath nearly a shout, letting the pain out the way they’d been taught. He was shaking with the spirit’s thrusts, his chest pushing down into the mattress no matter how hard Sam gripped. Sam’s right hand cramped and loosened, and his fingers slid and tugged against Dean’s forearm until they bumped up against the knob of Dean’s ulna. Sam gritted his teeth and squeezed until he felt the pain in his own bones.
“Sam!” Dean was saying it, gasping it out really, as if he’d been repeating it for a while. “Sam, you gotta let me go.”
Sam clutched at him, uncomprehending. But they hadn’t moved at all. The bed was still vibrating, and Dean’s eyes were squeezing closed in time with the sickening motion, and it was almost like he was holding Dean down, keeping him unable to fight back.
It took a second to force his hands to unclench. Dean shoved his arms down, bracing himself. His face was locked in a grimace. Then his head went back as if the thing had a grip on his hair.
“Go,” Dean ground out.
The illusion of privacy was the only thing he could give Dean now, so he went.
He didn’t leave the bathroom until long after the noises stopped.
****
In the morning, Dean was out of the shower before Sam roused from his stupor. But the sounds of Dean fumbling around their bags eventually brought him upright. Blinking sleep-gummed eyes, he saw that Dean had stolen one of Sam’s hoodies, gunmetal grey and so long that it flopped over the edges of his wrists. Fear jump-starting his heart, Sam sprang off of his bed and grabbed at the fabric, pulling it away from Dean’s skin even as Dean twisted away.
The bruises were faint, but there was no denying what they were. And Sam knew they were faint only because there wasn’t much flesh right around the wrist to bruise.
“It’s nothing,” Dean said, reclaiming his hand with a tug.
“If it’s nothing, why are you hiding it?”
Dean’s face grew darker. “You think I want some waitress, or worse a cop, asking about it? Maybe thinking you’re my abusive boyfriend who needs the fear of God put into him?”
Sam hadn’t feared God in years; too much else was on that list. “Show me the rest.”
Dean turned away, which was almost as much confirmation as he needed. But he couldn’t afford to back down on this. He waited while Dean examined the rusty brown-and-yellow paisley comforter on Sam’s bed. “It doesn’t mean—you already know you’re not gonna like it.”
“Please,” Sam said. He couldn’t have put words to why he was insisting. The logical part of his brain told him that he should have been respecting Dean’s desire for control. But this wasn’t just happening to Dean; it was happening to them, and he needed to see what he’d done.
After a moment Dean gave a put-upon sigh and stripped off his shirts in one fast movement, throwing them on the bed.
The bruises ran from his biceps, where Sam didn’t even remember grabbing, down to his forearms.
Sam wanted to cover his face, but Dean was already unbuckling his jeans, pushing his shorts down past his knees, trying to hide a wince as he bent a little and turned. His outer thighs were also marked, and blurry spots over his hips. Those were all consequences of Sam’s tug-of-war with the spirit. God, that was the best he could hope for, that it was only because Sam had tried to pull Dean away.
He’d seen Dean injured plenty of times, even for stupid reasons: bar brawls and fights over girls and, on occasion, failure to duck when no one with a single functioning brain cell should have failed to duck. He’d seen Dean injured because of him. But it was different now. Even under the purpling lines, he couldn’t stop thinking of Dean as he’d been last night, flushed and split open.
He knew why the spirits wanted what they wanted, and he would have torn out his own eyes if that could have removed the knowledge.
“Seen enough?” Dean asked, the sarcasm in his voice almost welcome. His face was a clenched fist.
Sam nodded and stumbled into the bathroom.
****
Sam always preferred it when they ate at national chains. It was more anonymous, which they maybe didn’t need to worry about so much now that they were officially dead. It was also more comforting: no matter where you were, an Egg McMuffin was going to taste just like the last one you had five hundred miles away.
He really needed something familiar this morning.
“Dude, you need to stop freaking out,” Dean said, sitting across the tiny orange plastic table from Sam. His words were almost obscured by the cup of coffee he was holding to his lips. “It’s just sex.”
Sam’s mouth dropped open. Of all the stupid iron-man crap ever to come out of Dean’s mouth—“Dean, you’re being—” And then of course he couldn’t say it. Angry tears threatened to overwhelm him, and he was fucking tired of being the emotional outlet for both of them. He gripped the edges of the table hard enough to bend his fingernails, using the pain to keep himself from breaking down.
Dean slammed the coffee down on the table between them, ignoring the splash that covered the back of his hand. “Just how do you want me to be dealing with it? Will it stop if I cry? If I decide I’m a victim, a civilian? ‘Cause if not, then let’s saddle up and not whine about what can’t be changed.”
Logically, it was possible that it would stop if Dean broke down, but that was unacceptable for a lot of reasons. Sam concentrated on stuffing his anger back into his gut, where it lived with all the other grievances he had against the world. “Okay, then,” he said. Dean tilted his head minutely, not quite sure what Sam meant. “If you’re not a victim, then it won’t be a problem for you to go through all the details. Everything, because we don’t know what’s important.” He heard the bitterness in his own voice, but if Dean could deal with the rest of it, he damn well needed to deal with that.
Dean swallowed and looked down at the reddened skin of his hand. Sam handed him a napkin dipped in ice water; Dean accepted it, because of course physical injuries needed to be treated.
“Fine,” Dean said, then looked out the window, rubbing his thumb across his bottom lip. Sam remembered how swollen and soft Dean’s lips had looked last night, afterwards. Blindly, he reached out for his drink and gulped, preparing himself to hear Dean’s story.
“I think it’s been different…spirits, or whatever it is. At least three different girls. Not sure about the guy or, uh, guys.”
“Why not?” He regretted the question immediately, but withdrawing it now would be worse.
Dean shrugged. His whole body was tilted towards the window now, one leg drawn up to rest on the edge of his yellow plastic chair. There was a hole growing at the knee of his jeans. He twisted his silver ring with his finger. His face, ghosted in the glass, was blank, almost indifferent. “Haven’t exactly been able to get my hands on him. You’re right though. I should try.”
Behind Dean, a man kicked over the janitor’s yellow bucket, coating the floor in front of the bathroom with dirty water. There was a rush of Spanish. Off to the side, a baby stopped babbling and started to cry.
Sam unclenched his fists. “Anything else? I know you don’t see them, but do you hear them? Taste, smell?”
Just like that, he could see Dean shift gears from stoic to hunter, really thinking about the question. “Can’t hear,” he said at last. “Not sure about the others.” Tomorrow, Sam knew, he would be.
Sam took what felt like his first breath in hours. “Come on,” he said, picking up their trays to head to the trash. “I’ve got some more rituals I want to perform.”
During the day, it was easy to tell himself that this was not too much unlike a hunt.
****
So that was how they worked: Sam tried increasingly desperate measures to stop, or at least identify, the things that visited every night, and Dean went along right up until Sam started talking about blood sacrifices. Sam spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how he might do one without Dean noticing, but the associated rituals tended to be pretty elaborate, and also to require the death to be extremely fresh.
The entities didn’t hurt Dean, not physically, after that fourth night.
Dean found a couple of simple salt-and-burns, puzzles he didn’t insist on Sam’s help with, and they laid the spirits to rest. It was easier, anyway, to spend more time apart. That way Sam wasn’t always watching Dean and Dean wasn’t constantly snapping at Sam that he was fine. The only thing Sam had to be grateful for was that Dean thought that Sam was just worried.
After the first few weeks, they returned to spending most of their time hunting. It was a welcome distraction, and it prevented Sam from succumbing to depression. They solved all the other supernatural puzzles they encountered, and that had to mean that they’d solve this one as well.
Dean still smiled at the end of a successful hunt, grim but real, and stood a little taller, at least until the next night. Sometimes he’d even remember himself enough to smack Sam on the shoulder, his way of saying ‘good job.’
There didn’t seem to be a relationship between the hunting and the assaults: they could spend the day investigating or hanging out at truck stops and diners, and the number of night visitors would vary just as much. Sam knew this because he made Dean keep track for the first few months, even though he could barely stomach looking at the numbers and trying to correlate them with day, job, location, or anything else.
Every night, just after midnight, Sam would grab his headphones and go into whatever tiny bathroom they had, closing the door. He’d sit against the tub or the wall or the door, whatever had the least amount of hardware to bang his head against, and he’d hang the headphones around his neck so that he could pretend to have been listening to music Dean hated. His ass got numb from sitting on hard cold tiles, and he got up close and personal with the dirt in the grout, because there was always dirt in the grout. Sometimes he’d pretend that the cracks in the porcelain formed runes that might tell his future: divination by bathroom, or latrinomancy.
At least sitting on the floor meant he didn’t have to look himself in the mirror while Dean was outside.
Dean never suggested that they get two rooms. After, redressed and nearly casual about it, he’d knock on the door and demand to be let in, as if Sam had been hogging all the hot water. But then he’d stand back and wait for Sam to come out.
In the old days he would have barged right in, heedless of the fact that two full-size guys in one pocket-sized bathroom was a recipe for bruises in unusual places.
Dean would shower while Sam pretended not to gravitate toward the other bed. Nights that it had lasted extra-long, or nights that Dean made noise, he’d get up out of his bed and pull back the covers on Dean’s, looking for—he didn’t know what. There were always wet spots; there was never blood. Dean’s spunk smelled different than his own, earthier.
When they could swing it, which was most nights, they moved rooms even if they were staying in the same place. Sam would make up some excuse about the AC or the shower and they’d get a fresh new room, one that didn’t smell of anything in particular. A couple of times, they were too tired and beat-up to pester the manager for a switch, and Sam spent his hour crouched dirty and trembling in the same bathroom as the previous night.
There was never any quarter, not even the time when Sam was still putting in stitches to close a cut on Dean’s right bicep. The wound was deep enough, endangering the muscle, that all Sam did was glance away from his work when the attack started, long enough to see that it was invisible fingers popping the buttons on Dean’s jeans and not Dean trying to squirm away. Dean was white under his tan, beads of sweat along his hairline. Along with the slice on his arm, he’d also been bounced off a couple of headstones.
Sam closed the edges with surgical glue, then started rummaging for some gauze. The mattress was shaking underneath them, and he couldn’t help losing his concentration. Seeing Dean’s half-hard dick flop around like a participant in a puppet show almost sent him to the floor with inappropriate, agonizing laughter. He stuffed his hand in his mouth and clenched his stomach muscles until they hurt.
Dean blinked up at him, still dazed, and the amusement wiped away with the sweep of those thick lashes. “She’s gonna rub my skin off before I get it up,” Dean told him, the words slow and blurry with pain and exhaustion. “C’n you--?”
Sam didn’t get it. Dean forced his hands a couple of inches off the bed, then let them drop. “Help me move her,” he said.
Sam was still confused. Okay, so he’d maybe taken a hit to the head along with Dean. Dean managed a hint of a smirk. “She’s not gonna stop until she gets off,” he said. “Gonna eat her out.”
It was all he could do not to rear back, and then it was all he could do not to fall off the bed, because this was so wrong that every inch of his skin crawled. But Dean was wincing, and he was the one who actually had to do it, so Sam bit his lip and tried to figure out how he could move something he couldn’t touch.
Dean lifted his hands again, curling the fingers. Dean could touch the entity, right. Sam reached across him to pick up his right hand and jerked it upwards. Stretching and twisting like that reminded him of the huge bruises rising on his back. He wasn’t going to be able to keep his balance.
“Fuck,” he said, giving up, and moved to straddle Dean, his knees bracketing Dean’s thighs, right where Dean’s jeans had been shoved down. He was in the same space as the entity, probably, and he was only inches from Dean’s dick. And Dean was looking up at him with perfect trust, his cloudy green eyes and twig-scratched face as open as Sam had ever seen.
He took a deep breath and gathered Dean’s hands into his own, pushing them around until they stopped. The shock vibrated into his own fingers, the transmitted contact with another being. He wondered, for a second, whether this counted as a threesome.
Dean’s fingers curved around the entity without Sam’s help, but Sam added pressure. Dean was coaxing, telling her how he was going to lick her real good, and whether or not she heard it she seemed to get the message. Sam thought they were pulling at her shoulders, or Dean was pulling and he was pushing, his hands hot against Dean’s as Dean’s mouth made more filthy promises. Their hands slid down her back as she arched up. Dean’s breath grew choked as if she were settling down over his face and neck, and his fingers moved more quickly against the invisible flesh of her ass.
Sam let his hands drop away. Dean looked—he looked ridiculous, with his eyes closed in concentration, his mouth moving like a baby sucking in its sleep, his tongue undulating obscenely and his hands clutching at empty air.
Sam turned his head, clenching his teeth until his bones ached, and managed to get off the bed without touching Dean any further.
Refusing to let himself think about it, he went into the bathroom, walked over to the toilet, and jerked off. After a minute, he didn’t even pretend not to be matching the rhythm of the squeaks from the bed outside.
That night, Dean didn’t come knock on the bathroom door. When Sam finally ventured out, his back spasming, Dean was passed out on his stomach, his knees still spread wide. With his stubbled face mashed into his pillow, he looked like he belonged on the cover of a porn DVD, except for the slice on his arm.
****
They saved two sisters from another wendigo in Montana. Sam didn't exactly expect Dean to suggest a double-header, but he was hoping that one or both of them would make a move. At the very least, it might force Dean to admit that something was wrong. Unfortunately, both sisters were too shy or shellshocked to do more than make Bambi eyes at their rescuers. When the initial disappointment faded, Sam realized that he was being an asshole, acting more entitled to get laid than Dean ever had except at his absolute nadir. Guilt made him so extra-nice to the girls during the trek back to civilization that they both made plays for him when they were safe.
Dean didn't react to that, either.
****
After a while, Dean acquired a tube of K-Y that he kept on the bedside table. He’d unpack it almost defiantly at first, slamming it down loud enough to make Sam jump. Later, Sam almost didn’t notice how one crumpled plastic tube replaced another.
He never thought about how Dean used it. He never looked at his brother’s fingers and wondered.
****
“Why don’t you hit, or bite?” he asked once, while Dean was shaving with the bathroom door open. Sam had never said, but Dean seemed to have figured out that Sam didn’t like having doors between them except when necessary.
Dean pulled his upper lip taut and cleaned it off with steady strokes, then brought the razor down. “Tried that a couple of times,” he said, staring into his reflection. “Not a good idea.”
After Dean had finished and patted his face dry with one of the tissue-thin hand towels piled on the side of the sink, he came out, still wearing just his T-shirt and boxers. “Hey,” he said, swatting Sam on the shoulder. “I let ‘em do what they want, it’s not so bad.”
Maybe Sam was supposed to tell him that it really, really was. If Dean would even once have broken down and asked for Sam to do or say something, Sam would have, no matter how fucked-up it was. But Sam refused to hurt himself that badly if it wouldn’t do any good for Dean.
****
Ellen called them in on a job involving a sorcerer. Six hunters had already gone down trying to kill an honest-to-God swamp monster, and she thought the sorcerer was playing both sides, pretending to want the thing killed, but actually leading the hunters into traps. She didn’t have a reason, just a feeling, plus six dead hunters, but Sam was inclined to trust her instincts.
They bypassed the sorcerer and went to the part of the wilderness area where the monster sightings had been thickest. There was a trail of broken bushes and beaten-down grasses, complete with several squashed small mammals. Whatever the thing was, it wasn’t hiding.
Dean went first, occasionally squelching through brown water that smelled strong enough to chew, pushing aside sharp-edged grasses with the tip of his homemade flamethrower, and generally having a grand old time. Sam followed, slapping at mosquitoes and keeping one hand on his shotgun.
Just past midday, they heard a commotion ahead, and sped up as best they could. They crashed through a thicket of vines into a sort of clearing.
On one side, the eight-foot-tall swamp monster, a mess of branches and leaves and mud in the rough shape of a biped, raised its arms and opened its mouth in a threat that was all the creepier for being silent. On the other, a dark-haired woman was whirling two brown sticks dotted with darker markings. Sam narrowed his eyes. He could almost make out the runes she was drawing in the air. He’d never seen that done before, but it seemed to be working: Every time she completed a pass, a part of the monster would wither and dry out.
Unfortunately for her, there was a lot of monster.
“Hey, lady, get back!” Dean yelled, and charged in. He needed to get past the woman in order to avoid hurting her badly with splashback; it wasn’t a precision weapon, which was probably why Dean had been so jazzed to try it out. Sam followed him, heading towards the woman to drag her out of the way if necessary.
But she sized up the situation and fell back with Sam to the edge of the clearing. The flamethrower ignited with a roar, shooting out a stream of fire that rapidly expanded to the size of a burning car, coating the swamp monster and its surroundings with flames.
Sam put his arm out in front of the woman, then dropped it when she snorted. Dean hadn’t mentioned how the smoke was going to fill the clearing so that all they could see was billowing white dotted with burning orange.
“Is that napalm?” she asked, loud enough to be heard.
Sam nodded.
“Oh, I like him,” she said. Still, she had a nice smile, wide and crinkled in the corners. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and she had pink spots high on her cheeks from exertion. “I’m Rose.”
“Sam and Dean,” Sam told her.
Dean backed up, playing the flames across the area where the swamp monster had been, a sort of reverse fireman. The cylinders strapped across his back swayed, and Sam hoped Dean had been right about how they wouldn’t blow up.
Finally Dean reached the clump of trees where Sam and Rose were standing. He nodded his head and shut off the nozzle but didn’t take his eyes off of the mass of smoke.
Sam’s eyes were burning. “Got any ideas for how to make sure it’s dead?” he asked.
Rose raised her sticks and swirled them again, looking for all the world like a woman miming large-scale knitting. The smoke settled down to the ground, revealing a lot of burning vegetation, including an enormous lump now lumbering towards them on its quasi-hands and knees. The napalm had stuck to it, dripping through its body so that the sticks and leaves on the outside were lit up from within even as they shriveled.
“Hunh,” Dean said. “I thought it’d go down faster.”
They ran. Sam would have bet on surviving several hits from the thing if it hadn’t been covered with napalm, but as it was he just fired his shells when he had the chance to knock off larger protrusions. Rose proved equally good at aiming her sticks backwards.
By the time they were faltering and out of breath, the swamp monster was down to the size of a golden retriever, and they could afford to make a stand and blast it into its component plants. Rose’s last hit got a ball of dirt at its center that exploded it outwards like a pumpkin.
Sam looked back at their path, a line of smoldering and still-burning debris, and wondered how he’d gotten to the point that thinking ‘that went well’ was not satirical.
Meanwhile, Dean was shucking off the backpack and demonstrating how he’d put it together, so caught up in his own awesomeness that he barely seemed aware that Rose was a good-looking woman wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt.
“What about the sorcerer?” Sam asked, raising his voice enough to get their attention.
“Sorcerer?” Rose asked.
It developed that Rose hadn’t contacted the sorcerer either. She’d heard about the swamp monster from an entirely different network, a group of enviro-pagans.
Sam scrutinized her as she told Dean war stories, and heard a few in return. Along with the carved spell-sticks, she had a shoulder holster carrying a semiautomatic and a ten-inch knife sheath on her hip. Scars across her biceps, and one faint on her left cheek, suggested some familiarity with hunting.
He wasn’t thrilled that she invited herself along on the search for the sorcerer. Not that they had an exclusive right to go after him, so he couldn’t say anything.
****
Four hours later, he listened to the sound of Rose kicking her knife over towards him while he struggled with the ropes binding him to one of the big sacrificial posts in the sorcerer’s workshop. Her aim was excellent and the sorcerer didn’t seem to notice the change when he swiveled away from Dean to check on them.
The fact that the sorcerer hadn’t decided to hang Sam from his wrists the way he’d done Rose was their only hope; chalk one up for being too tall for low ceilings.
The sorcerer turned back to Dean, who was refusing to retreat from the little protective arc he’d scrawled just in front of the workroom door. Sam forbore from yelling at Dean again and squatted. He ignored the tearing in his shoulders and his thighs and shuffled himself around the post until he could fumble the blade into his fingers. He felt the blood dripping hot down his fingers before he noticed the pain of the cuts. He levered the knife slowly up until he could let the hilt slide into his palm and hoped Rose cared as much about balance as she did about edge.
Dean ramped up the imprecations; at this point, Sam thought, he was insulting the sorcerer’s third cousins, not to mention his fashion sense.
Sam forced himself back to his feet and began sawing through the ropes, trying to keep his arms in the same position as they’d been tied in case the sorcerer looked back too soon. His grip was blood-slick.
The sorcerer strode jauntily over to a table on the side of the room and retrieved a rapier. Sam felt the first rope part. But they were heavy and coated with something slippery enough that even Rose’s blade had trouble staying in place long enough to slice through the strands.
Dean stopped mouthing off when he saw the rapier, but he didn’t move from the circle. There was no escape backwards, even if Dean would have been willing to take it; the sorcerer’s panther waited if Dean tried to retreat.
“What, out of insults now?” the sorcerer asked, nearly cooing. “The cat doesn’t have your tongue, does she? Not yet anyway.”
“Wow,” Dean said. “That stunk worse than your breath.”
Second rope. Sam felt the whole knot give a little, but not enough to free him.
The sorcerer jabbed Dean’s shoulder, forcing him back to the edge of his circle. Blood soaked quickly through Dean’s shirt. If Dean made noise, Sam couldn’t hear it. Dean tried to block the next blow with his arm, but the sorcerer just disengaged, poked him in the belly and laughed.
“I can do anything I want to you,” he said. “Your friends get to watch. You’re lucky, really, when you think about my plans for them.”
“Hey,” Sam said. The sorcerer stuck his weapon into the top of Dean’s right thigh and twisted, and Dean did yell this time. “Hey, asshole.”
The sorcerer froze and turned the top half of his body back towards Sam. “Your cr—”
He blinked once and fell, the hilt of the knife fetched up against his Adam’s apple. Dean dodged and managed to shove the body through the door before slamming it behind him. Wet sounds came from the hallway. Apparently the panther hadn’t appreciated being bound to service.
Sam hurried to Dean, who was already limping to the closest bench. Dean grimaced at the dried-up body parts in his way, then swept a space clear with his hand and sat heavily down.
Rose waited as patiently as he could have expected while he tied up Dean’s wounds. She sighed with relief when he released her and began rubbing her own shoulders even as she hurried to the place where the sorcerer had tossed her weapons.
“Thanks for the knife,” Sam told her.
“Thanks for throwing it.”
“We should see about finding the hunters’ bodies,” Dean said from the bench. “The rest of ‘em, I mean. This is a salt and burn if I ever saw one.”
“I’ll check upstairs,” Sam said. On the way in, he’d seen the sorcerer’s library.
Fifteen minutes later, Dean and Rose appeared in the door. Sam looked up from the pile he’d assembled. “Come on, Sam,” Dean said.
“I’ve still got two bookshelves—”
“We’ve got two minutes before the fire comes upstairs,” Dean said over Rose’s “That’s black magic.”
Sam sucked it up and shoved two thick volumes into Dean’s arms, grabbing the rest of them himself.
“Sam’s just curious,” Dean explained to Rose, who was looking at Sam with new suspicion. She’d retrieved her knife, he saw. He didn’t ask what they’d done with the panther.
****
Later, over drinks, Rose let them get away with an extremely abbreviated version of their life stories, which might have had something to do with the way that she turned every question about herself into an anecdote about magic or demons. When she mentioned a few practices that weren’t exactly white magic, Sam raised his eyebrow; she bit her lip and didn’t mention the sorcerer’s books again.
“We should keep in touch,” Rose said after Dean had boasted of his tulpa-exterminating prowess. “I don’t have a predictable schedule, but who knows? If you guys calm down and stop charging into situations unprepared, we might end up fighting the same bad guys again one of these days.”
Dean drained his beer. “Prepared enough for today,” he said as he set the empty down with a thunk.
“Please,” she said. “We got captured, you got tortured. If you’re happy with the results, I’d hate to see your definition of half-assed.”
Sam snorted despite himself.
Rose leaned back in her seat. “I do have one question, though.”
“This I gotta hear,” Dean said.
Rose examined them in turn. “Are you two just as crazy in other ways?”
Dean smiled at her, but there was a thin layer of ice over it now. Sam took a little longer to get it, and felt every capillary in his skin filling up with blood. “Sorry, no,” he said, stumbling over the words. He was already imagining it anyway: Rose between them, kissing Rose’s shoulder, kissing past it to latch his mouth onto Dean’s collarbone, putting his hands on breasts and chests and thighs, anything he wanted to touch open to him. Pressing her between them like her namesake, letting her draw blood if she wanted, hot and close and wet. Sam dug his fingers into his thigh, grounding himself.
Dean was watching him sidelong. “Hey,” he said. “I’m going to turn in. You make sure she gets back to her room safe, little brother.”
Sam frowned in annoyance, but Rose just smiled, wide and slow. She didn’t protest that she was a big girl.
“Actually, I’m pretty tired too,” he said abruptly, his eyes fixed on Dean’s retreating back. “I’m sorry,” he told her, and sort of meant it.
Rose shrugged, her mouth quirking up in a way that highlighted just how attractive she was. “Worth a try. You boys take care, now.”
“You too,” he said, totally sincere this time. He threw enough money down to cover their tab and took off.
Dean was just sitting in the car, holding on to the wheel, when Sam caught up with him. He jerked in surprise when Sam tapped on the glass of the passenger side. Dean didn’t ask, just started the car and drove them back.
The place they were staying had poor framing; the bathroom door wouldn’t stay fully closed, drifting a couple of inches open no matter what Sam did.
Sam couldn’t see much, only a slice of Dean’s shoulder, twisting and turning. Dean was on his back, then on his stomach, then on his back again. Sam leaned his head back against too-warm tile and put his fist in his lap, his cock throbbing relentlessly, fever-hot against his spit-slick palm.
He imagined biting down on Dean’s neck, licking down the lines of his pelvic cut, touching the inside of his elbow and the back of his knee and all the other soft places.
He came just before Dean finished, and had to flush the tissue standing on still-wobbly legs. Dean didn’t seem to notice Sam’s distraction when he stumbled into the bathroom, which was the only mercy Sam needed.
Next part.
Of course there was nothing in Sam’s books or in the databases he used. He didn’t even think Dean’s eager assistance would have helped, because what he had was a lot of information about incubi and succubi, a little bit of information about non-European variants, and practically zip on invisible sexual attackers. Everything he found turned out to be about that old movie with Barbara Hershey. Even if he took that story as gospel, it offered no solutions, only desperation.
He kept seeing last night in his mind’s eye: Dean splayed out, ready for the taking. Unable to see what was coming, required to go along with whatever happened. Because the entity was invisible, Sam thought, it seemed more like a fantasy. A demon lover, a force making Dean do only what he’d really wanted all along.
At the time, he’d been too terrified and awkward to think about the image. But now, when he remembered watching, remembered his hands passing right over Dean’s body, it felt like he had been alone with Dean.
The only refuge was in brainstorming solutions. If he fixed the problem, he wouldn’t have to worry about Dean’s all-too-visible sex life any more.
Dinner was near-silent. Sam brought a notebook with him, and he spent most of the meal sketching and scratching out various seals to draw around Dean. In general, the less you knew about what you were trying to keep out, the more diffuse the protections would be. He’d need the magical equivalent of a nuclear power plant to make his current ideas more than a momentary nuisance to any focused malicious entity. Staring down at his best attempt, he frowned and rubbed his temples, where the headache had settled in hours ago and seemed ready to start redecorating.
“You’re freaking out the civilians,” Dean said. “You think you could try something besides your death glare?”
He brought his head up, but Dean was already smiling over at the waitress, gesturing at his water glass. She gave him a little I’ll-be-right-there wave, and he nodded and winked. Sam thought Dean was on autopilot; he probably didn’t even notice he was flirting.
“So, I thought we’d head on over to that poltergeist in Springfield tomorrow,” Dean said deliberately, lacing his fingers together and resting his hands on the edge of the table.
Sam blinked slowly, then forced his jaw to unclench. He looked down at his tepid steak, carrot coins and mashed potatoes. He remembered that the plate had arrived steaming. He forced himself to release the pen and pick up the fork.
Dad had always made them eat unless they were so sick that it would just come right back up. At Stanford, he’d used his freedom to skip meals at will, sometimes eating only one meal every twenty-four hours. Now, he couldn’t afford the luxury of nearly passing out from hunger and then stuffing himself until he reached food coma. He opened his mouth and took a bite. The meat would have been fine if it had been hot, and the potatoes were grainy and peppery. The carrots were gelatinous but still tasted like vegetables.
Sam chewed his way through the food while Dean took the waitress’s recommendation and ordered himself a slice of Boston cream pie. As long as it had sugar and whipped cream, Dean didn’t care about the other ingredients. He ate with apparent enjoyment.
****
The previous attacks had occurred after midnight, but they were still back in the room by nine o’clock. Sam wanted plenty of time to prep. Beyond the usual salt lines, beyond the devil’s traps, he festooned the room with every protective charm and sigil he knew. The motel was going to need to replace the carpets and repaint the walls. He invoked protection from four deities and three supernatural guardians. He burned incense that was supposed to make the invisible manifest. Dean choked theatrically and then had to jump frantically on the bed to disable the smoke alarm. The motel might also need to invest in fumigation.
After the preliminaries were complete, Sam laid out his weapons just in case any of his attempts worked. Then he rearranged the order, and decided to hide a couple in handy spots. Ordinarily, Dean would have offered color commentary. His silence made the knot in Sam’s stomach tighten further.
Dean worked on his in-progress EMF detector, the one that was going to be housed in a video iPod, for about fifteen minutes before throwing his pliers across the room, embedding the nose in the soft plaster above the television.
“It’s going to be fine,” Sam said, his voice almost steady.
Dean’s sneer in response threatened hot death. He stood, his hands flexing at his sides. “Yeah, that’s why we’ve been walking around like I’m heading to the electric chair.”
Well, excuse the fuck out of me for being upset, Sam thought. He took a deep breath. “We still don’t know what it wants.” Dean opened his mouth, and Sam continued, “We don’t know if it’s going to—escalate.”
“Three nights, that’s a pattern,” Dean said.
“So you’re okay with that?” Sam asked. The question came out flatter than he’d meant it, almost like he was asking seriously.
Dean stalked over to the television and rested one hand on it. “I’m not doing a happy dance, Sam. But this, this is worse.”
Eventually Dean sighed, pulled the pliers free from the wall, and returned to his seat to clean up his electronics.
After that, Dean fidgeted, alternately playing with his knives and scanning the TV for something he deemed worth watching. Food Channel: No. Discovery Channel: Yes, for three minutes at a time. Sam kept scratching at his arms and legs, tiny itches fooling him into searching for ants or spiders that didn’t exist.
About fifteen minutes after midnight, it began. Dean, who’d been pacing like a caged mountain lion, gave a surprised huff and pitched backwards on the bed, just as if he’d been thrown flat by an angry ghost. Sam began chanting as Dean’s overshirt twitched and rustled. Instead of ripping it open as it had the previous night, the entity slipped the buttons open one by one, then pushed the shirt off his shoulders. The demon-thing went for his belt next, popping it open and then pulling Dean’s zipper down so fast that Sam would have feared for his brother’s safety even if it had just been a woman doing it.
Dean’s eyes scanned back and forth as if there were something there to see. “Not that this ain’t flattering, sweetheart, but you’re really not my type,” he said. A stranger would have thought that Dean’s drawl was relaxed, but Sam heard the golden thread of anger in it.
Dean grunted in surprise as his jeans wrestled themselves down his hips, just as Sam blew a handful of spell powder over him. It drifted gently down onto Dean’s body, encountering no obstacle, coating his stomach and the T-shirt that was being shoved up to his armpits. Dean sneezed and cursed, pushing at his attacker. Then Dean seemed to be squeezing the thing’s tits, his expression going from pissed-off to interested and pissed-off.
“Any more bright ideas?” Dean asked as he did something that might have been rolling a nipple between his thumb and his index finger.
Sam checked the cheat sheet of rituals he’d left on the bedside table. He started again, this time in Romanian. He was basically just trusting that intent would trump pronunciation; that always worked with Latin. Dean grunted, and Sam lost his place in the ritual. Dean’s cock was hard, and curved towards his stomach in a way that looked—that was what it must look like when he was fucking someone, Sam realized. When he was inside a woman. Sam made his mouth restart the words of banishment.
Every nerve was sparking, fear-energy crackling through him until he felt as charged-up as a plasma lamp. Dean was thrusting up, mumbling to himself as he worked one hand in the air above his dick, like he was almost jacking himself off but was too ashamed to close that last inch.
His back was arching, curling him up off the bed; his other hand stroked the air beside his hip. Sam could imagine an invisible leg, wrapped around him.
Sam’s words stumbled to a halt just as Dean thrust up one last time and cursed, coming in thin jets that splashed unhindered onto his stomach. That was bizarre, but magic’s rules were always bizarre, and Sam shouldn’t be staring at the way the white streaks spattered onto Dean’s abs and pooled in the dip of his belly button and ran down over his hips and into the creases where his thighs joined his torso.
Sam swallowed and tried to find something safer to look at, and his eyes dropped to the scar at the front of Dean’s right thigh, long and thick, cross-hatched with white keloids from what must have been impromptu field surgery. It looked like a cartoon drawing of a gaping mouth. Dean had gotten that while Sam was at Stanford. It was no uglier than the carnations on Dean’s chest and back from his gunshot wounds, but Sam wondered now why he had never asked about it. Wondered how Dean could stand getting so torn up when the world didn’t know and didn’t care what he sacrificed.
It was all mixed up, sex and failure and the desire to do clean violence to something evil; Sam needed to put his hands on something, but there was nothing safe within reach. He closed his eyes and tried to breathe it all out, shut it down until he was more than a mess of hate-filled blood and bone.
Dean cleared his throat. “You want to clean this shit up—” his handwave encompassed all the extra ritual paraphernalia in the room—“or wait for morning?”
“Morning, I guess,” Sam said. “I’m gonna—” He headed for the bathroom, planning to wash his hands and maybe his face. His mind was as empty as a new-dug grave.
While he was still washing the last traces of the spell powder off of his forearms, he heard Dean’s shout of surprise.
He charged back out. Dean was on his hands and knees on the bed. Dean’s head bowed down and his shoulders strained as he tried to crawl forwards, but failed. His knees were spread far apart, and—
Sam skidded to a halt. It was just so strange. Dean’s ass was up in the air, and his hole was stretched wide, the flesh quivering with movement, but there was nothing there. It was like seeing a fakir with incredible control over usually autonomic body functions, except performing a sex show. It was so bizarre that it took him a few seconds to process what was actually happening. Then it wasn’t befuddlement but rage that held him pinned.
Dean’s hands and knees slipped on the sheets every time he tried to pull away.
If he couldn’t get the thing off Dean—
Sam grabbed Dean’s wrists, not thinking of anything beyond the need to get Dean free. He braced one foot on the side of the bed and one on the floor, pulling with every fiber of muscle. Dean’s face blurred in Sam’s vision, just a flash of the whites of his eyes. Dean grabbed on to Sam’s upper arms and his shoulders extended as he was pulled inexorably back. His fingers skidded along Sam’s skin until they lost their purchase.
Dean was panting now, each breath nearly a shout, letting the pain out the way they’d been taught. He was shaking with the spirit’s thrusts, his chest pushing down into the mattress no matter how hard Sam gripped. Sam’s right hand cramped and loosened, and his fingers slid and tugged against Dean’s forearm until they bumped up against the knob of Dean’s ulna. Sam gritted his teeth and squeezed until he felt the pain in his own bones.
“Sam!” Dean was saying it, gasping it out really, as if he’d been repeating it for a while. “Sam, you gotta let me go.”
Sam clutched at him, uncomprehending. But they hadn’t moved at all. The bed was still vibrating, and Dean’s eyes were squeezing closed in time with the sickening motion, and it was almost like he was holding Dean down, keeping him unable to fight back.
It took a second to force his hands to unclench. Dean shoved his arms down, bracing himself. His face was locked in a grimace. Then his head went back as if the thing had a grip on his hair.
“Go,” Dean ground out.
The illusion of privacy was the only thing he could give Dean now, so he went.
He didn’t leave the bathroom until long after the noises stopped.
****
In the morning, Dean was out of the shower before Sam roused from his stupor. But the sounds of Dean fumbling around their bags eventually brought him upright. Blinking sleep-gummed eyes, he saw that Dean had stolen one of Sam’s hoodies, gunmetal grey and so long that it flopped over the edges of his wrists. Fear jump-starting his heart, Sam sprang off of his bed and grabbed at the fabric, pulling it away from Dean’s skin even as Dean twisted away.
The bruises were faint, but there was no denying what they were. And Sam knew they were faint only because there wasn’t much flesh right around the wrist to bruise.
“It’s nothing,” Dean said, reclaiming his hand with a tug.
“If it’s nothing, why are you hiding it?”
Dean’s face grew darker. “You think I want some waitress, or worse a cop, asking about it? Maybe thinking you’re my abusive boyfriend who needs the fear of God put into him?”
Sam hadn’t feared God in years; too much else was on that list. “Show me the rest.”
Dean turned away, which was almost as much confirmation as he needed. But he couldn’t afford to back down on this. He waited while Dean examined the rusty brown-and-yellow paisley comforter on Sam’s bed. “It doesn’t mean—you already know you’re not gonna like it.”
“Please,” Sam said. He couldn’t have put words to why he was insisting. The logical part of his brain told him that he should have been respecting Dean’s desire for control. But this wasn’t just happening to Dean; it was happening to them, and he needed to see what he’d done.
After a moment Dean gave a put-upon sigh and stripped off his shirts in one fast movement, throwing them on the bed.
The bruises ran from his biceps, where Sam didn’t even remember grabbing, down to his forearms.
Sam wanted to cover his face, but Dean was already unbuckling his jeans, pushing his shorts down past his knees, trying to hide a wince as he bent a little and turned. His outer thighs were also marked, and blurry spots over his hips. Those were all consequences of Sam’s tug-of-war with the spirit. God, that was the best he could hope for, that it was only because Sam had tried to pull Dean away.
He’d seen Dean injured plenty of times, even for stupid reasons: bar brawls and fights over girls and, on occasion, failure to duck when no one with a single functioning brain cell should have failed to duck. He’d seen Dean injured because of him. But it was different now. Even under the purpling lines, he couldn’t stop thinking of Dean as he’d been last night, flushed and split open.
He knew why the spirits wanted what they wanted, and he would have torn out his own eyes if that could have removed the knowledge.
“Seen enough?” Dean asked, the sarcasm in his voice almost welcome. His face was a clenched fist.
Sam nodded and stumbled into the bathroom.
****
Sam always preferred it when they ate at national chains. It was more anonymous, which they maybe didn’t need to worry about so much now that they were officially dead. It was also more comforting: no matter where you were, an Egg McMuffin was going to taste just like the last one you had five hundred miles away.
He really needed something familiar this morning.
“Dude, you need to stop freaking out,” Dean said, sitting across the tiny orange plastic table from Sam. His words were almost obscured by the cup of coffee he was holding to his lips. “It’s just sex.”
Sam’s mouth dropped open. Of all the stupid iron-man crap ever to come out of Dean’s mouth—“Dean, you’re being—” And then of course he couldn’t say it. Angry tears threatened to overwhelm him, and he was fucking tired of being the emotional outlet for both of them. He gripped the edges of the table hard enough to bend his fingernails, using the pain to keep himself from breaking down.
Dean slammed the coffee down on the table between them, ignoring the splash that covered the back of his hand. “Just how do you want me to be dealing with it? Will it stop if I cry? If I decide I’m a victim, a civilian? ‘Cause if not, then let’s saddle up and not whine about what can’t be changed.”
Logically, it was possible that it would stop if Dean broke down, but that was unacceptable for a lot of reasons. Sam concentrated on stuffing his anger back into his gut, where it lived with all the other grievances he had against the world. “Okay, then,” he said. Dean tilted his head minutely, not quite sure what Sam meant. “If you’re not a victim, then it won’t be a problem for you to go through all the details. Everything, because we don’t know what’s important.” He heard the bitterness in his own voice, but if Dean could deal with the rest of it, he damn well needed to deal with that.
Dean swallowed and looked down at the reddened skin of his hand. Sam handed him a napkin dipped in ice water; Dean accepted it, because of course physical injuries needed to be treated.
“Fine,” Dean said, then looked out the window, rubbing his thumb across his bottom lip. Sam remembered how swollen and soft Dean’s lips had looked last night, afterwards. Blindly, he reached out for his drink and gulped, preparing himself to hear Dean’s story.
“I think it’s been different…spirits, or whatever it is. At least three different girls. Not sure about the guy or, uh, guys.”
“Why not?” He regretted the question immediately, but withdrawing it now would be worse.
Dean shrugged. His whole body was tilted towards the window now, one leg drawn up to rest on the edge of his yellow plastic chair. There was a hole growing at the knee of his jeans. He twisted his silver ring with his finger. His face, ghosted in the glass, was blank, almost indifferent. “Haven’t exactly been able to get my hands on him. You’re right though. I should try.”
Behind Dean, a man kicked over the janitor’s yellow bucket, coating the floor in front of the bathroom with dirty water. There was a rush of Spanish. Off to the side, a baby stopped babbling and started to cry.
Sam unclenched his fists. “Anything else? I know you don’t see them, but do you hear them? Taste, smell?”
Just like that, he could see Dean shift gears from stoic to hunter, really thinking about the question. “Can’t hear,” he said at last. “Not sure about the others.” Tomorrow, Sam knew, he would be.
Sam took what felt like his first breath in hours. “Come on,” he said, picking up their trays to head to the trash. “I’ve got some more rituals I want to perform.”
During the day, it was easy to tell himself that this was not too much unlike a hunt.
****
So that was how they worked: Sam tried increasingly desperate measures to stop, or at least identify, the things that visited every night, and Dean went along right up until Sam started talking about blood sacrifices. Sam spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out how he might do one without Dean noticing, but the associated rituals tended to be pretty elaborate, and also to require the death to be extremely fresh.
The entities didn’t hurt Dean, not physically, after that fourth night.
Dean found a couple of simple salt-and-burns, puzzles he didn’t insist on Sam’s help with, and they laid the spirits to rest. It was easier, anyway, to spend more time apart. That way Sam wasn’t always watching Dean and Dean wasn’t constantly snapping at Sam that he was fine. The only thing Sam had to be grateful for was that Dean thought that Sam was just worried.
After the first few weeks, they returned to spending most of their time hunting. It was a welcome distraction, and it prevented Sam from succumbing to depression. They solved all the other supernatural puzzles they encountered, and that had to mean that they’d solve this one as well.
Dean still smiled at the end of a successful hunt, grim but real, and stood a little taller, at least until the next night. Sometimes he’d even remember himself enough to smack Sam on the shoulder, his way of saying ‘good job.’
There didn’t seem to be a relationship between the hunting and the assaults: they could spend the day investigating or hanging out at truck stops and diners, and the number of night visitors would vary just as much. Sam knew this because he made Dean keep track for the first few months, even though he could barely stomach looking at the numbers and trying to correlate them with day, job, location, or anything else.
Every night, just after midnight, Sam would grab his headphones and go into whatever tiny bathroom they had, closing the door. He’d sit against the tub or the wall or the door, whatever had the least amount of hardware to bang his head against, and he’d hang the headphones around his neck so that he could pretend to have been listening to music Dean hated. His ass got numb from sitting on hard cold tiles, and he got up close and personal with the dirt in the grout, because there was always dirt in the grout. Sometimes he’d pretend that the cracks in the porcelain formed runes that might tell his future: divination by bathroom, or latrinomancy.
At least sitting on the floor meant he didn’t have to look himself in the mirror while Dean was outside.
Dean never suggested that they get two rooms. After, redressed and nearly casual about it, he’d knock on the door and demand to be let in, as if Sam had been hogging all the hot water. But then he’d stand back and wait for Sam to come out.
In the old days he would have barged right in, heedless of the fact that two full-size guys in one pocket-sized bathroom was a recipe for bruises in unusual places.
Dean would shower while Sam pretended not to gravitate toward the other bed. Nights that it had lasted extra-long, or nights that Dean made noise, he’d get up out of his bed and pull back the covers on Dean’s, looking for—he didn’t know what. There were always wet spots; there was never blood. Dean’s spunk smelled different than his own, earthier.
When they could swing it, which was most nights, they moved rooms even if they were staying in the same place. Sam would make up some excuse about the AC or the shower and they’d get a fresh new room, one that didn’t smell of anything in particular. A couple of times, they were too tired and beat-up to pester the manager for a switch, and Sam spent his hour crouched dirty and trembling in the same bathroom as the previous night.
There was never any quarter, not even the time when Sam was still putting in stitches to close a cut on Dean’s right bicep. The wound was deep enough, endangering the muscle, that all Sam did was glance away from his work when the attack started, long enough to see that it was invisible fingers popping the buttons on Dean’s jeans and not Dean trying to squirm away. Dean was white under his tan, beads of sweat along his hairline. Along with the slice on his arm, he’d also been bounced off a couple of headstones.
Sam closed the edges with surgical glue, then started rummaging for some gauze. The mattress was shaking underneath them, and he couldn’t help losing his concentration. Seeing Dean’s half-hard dick flop around like a participant in a puppet show almost sent him to the floor with inappropriate, agonizing laughter. He stuffed his hand in his mouth and clenched his stomach muscles until they hurt.
Dean blinked up at him, still dazed, and the amusement wiped away with the sweep of those thick lashes. “She’s gonna rub my skin off before I get it up,” Dean told him, the words slow and blurry with pain and exhaustion. “C’n you--?”
Sam didn’t get it. Dean forced his hands a couple of inches off the bed, then let them drop. “Help me move her,” he said.
Sam was still confused. Okay, so he’d maybe taken a hit to the head along with Dean. Dean managed a hint of a smirk. “She’s not gonna stop until she gets off,” he said. “Gonna eat her out.”
It was all he could do not to rear back, and then it was all he could do not to fall off the bed, because this was so wrong that every inch of his skin crawled. But Dean was wincing, and he was the one who actually had to do it, so Sam bit his lip and tried to figure out how he could move something he couldn’t touch.
Dean lifted his hands again, curling the fingers. Dean could touch the entity, right. Sam reached across him to pick up his right hand and jerked it upwards. Stretching and twisting like that reminded him of the huge bruises rising on his back. He wasn’t going to be able to keep his balance.
“Fuck,” he said, giving up, and moved to straddle Dean, his knees bracketing Dean’s thighs, right where Dean’s jeans had been shoved down. He was in the same space as the entity, probably, and he was only inches from Dean’s dick. And Dean was looking up at him with perfect trust, his cloudy green eyes and twig-scratched face as open as Sam had ever seen.
He took a deep breath and gathered Dean’s hands into his own, pushing them around until they stopped. The shock vibrated into his own fingers, the transmitted contact with another being. He wondered, for a second, whether this counted as a threesome.
Dean’s fingers curved around the entity without Sam’s help, but Sam added pressure. Dean was coaxing, telling her how he was going to lick her real good, and whether or not she heard it she seemed to get the message. Sam thought they were pulling at her shoulders, or Dean was pulling and he was pushing, his hands hot against Dean’s as Dean’s mouth made more filthy promises. Their hands slid down her back as she arched up. Dean’s breath grew choked as if she were settling down over his face and neck, and his fingers moved more quickly against the invisible flesh of her ass.
Sam let his hands drop away. Dean looked—he looked ridiculous, with his eyes closed in concentration, his mouth moving like a baby sucking in its sleep, his tongue undulating obscenely and his hands clutching at empty air.
Sam turned his head, clenching his teeth until his bones ached, and managed to get off the bed without touching Dean any further.
Refusing to let himself think about it, he went into the bathroom, walked over to the toilet, and jerked off. After a minute, he didn’t even pretend not to be matching the rhythm of the squeaks from the bed outside.
That night, Dean didn’t come knock on the bathroom door. When Sam finally ventured out, his back spasming, Dean was passed out on his stomach, his knees still spread wide. With his stubbled face mashed into his pillow, he looked like he belonged on the cover of a porn DVD, except for the slice on his arm.
****
They saved two sisters from another wendigo in Montana. Sam didn't exactly expect Dean to suggest a double-header, but he was hoping that one or both of them would make a move. At the very least, it might force Dean to admit that something was wrong. Unfortunately, both sisters were too shy or shellshocked to do more than make Bambi eyes at their rescuers. When the initial disappointment faded, Sam realized that he was being an asshole, acting more entitled to get laid than Dean ever had except at his absolute nadir. Guilt made him so extra-nice to the girls during the trek back to civilization that they both made plays for him when they were safe.
Dean didn't react to that, either.
****
After a while, Dean acquired a tube of K-Y that he kept on the bedside table. He’d unpack it almost defiantly at first, slamming it down loud enough to make Sam jump. Later, Sam almost didn’t notice how one crumpled plastic tube replaced another.
He never thought about how Dean used it. He never looked at his brother’s fingers and wondered.
****
“Why don’t you hit, or bite?” he asked once, while Dean was shaving with the bathroom door open. Sam had never said, but Dean seemed to have figured out that Sam didn’t like having doors between them except when necessary.
Dean pulled his upper lip taut and cleaned it off with steady strokes, then brought the razor down. “Tried that a couple of times,” he said, staring into his reflection. “Not a good idea.”
After Dean had finished and patted his face dry with one of the tissue-thin hand towels piled on the side of the sink, he came out, still wearing just his T-shirt and boxers. “Hey,” he said, swatting Sam on the shoulder. “I let ‘em do what they want, it’s not so bad.”
Maybe Sam was supposed to tell him that it really, really was. If Dean would even once have broken down and asked for Sam to do or say something, Sam would have, no matter how fucked-up it was. But Sam refused to hurt himself that badly if it wouldn’t do any good for Dean.
****
Ellen called them in on a job involving a sorcerer. Six hunters had already gone down trying to kill an honest-to-God swamp monster, and she thought the sorcerer was playing both sides, pretending to want the thing killed, but actually leading the hunters into traps. She didn’t have a reason, just a feeling, plus six dead hunters, but Sam was inclined to trust her instincts.
They bypassed the sorcerer and went to the part of the wilderness area where the monster sightings had been thickest. There was a trail of broken bushes and beaten-down grasses, complete with several squashed small mammals. Whatever the thing was, it wasn’t hiding.
Dean went first, occasionally squelching through brown water that smelled strong enough to chew, pushing aside sharp-edged grasses with the tip of his homemade flamethrower, and generally having a grand old time. Sam followed, slapping at mosquitoes and keeping one hand on his shotgun.
Just past midday, they heard a commotion ahead, and sped up as best they could. They crashed through a thicket of vines into a sort of clearing.
On one side, the eight-foot-tall swamp monster, a mess of branches and leaves and mud in the rough shape of a biped, raised its arms and opened its mouth in a threat that was all the creepier for being silent. On the other, a dark-haired woman was whirling two brown sticks dotted with darker markings. Sam narrowed his eyes. He could almost make out the runes she was drawing in the air. He’d never seen that done before, but it seemed to be working: Every time she completed a pass, a part of the monster would wither and dry out.
Unfortunately for her, there was a lot of monster.
“Hey, lady, get back!” Dean yelled, and charged in. He needed to get past the woman in order to avoid hurting her badly with splashback; it wasn’t a precision weapon, which was probably why Dean had been so jazzed to try it out. Sam followed him, heading towards the woman to drag her out of the way if necessary.
But she sized up the situation and fell back with Sam to the edge of the clearing. The flamethrower ignited with a roar, shooting out a stream of fire that rapidly expanded to the size of a burning car, coating the swamp monster and its surroundings with flames.
Sam put his arm out in front of the woman, then dropped it when she snorted. Dean hadn’t mentioned how the smoke was going to fill the clearing so that all they could see was billowing white dotted with burning orange.
“Is that napalm?” she asked, loud enough to be heard.
Sam nodded.
“Oh, I like him,” she said. Still, she had a nice smile, wide and crinkled in the corners. Her hair was pulled back in a low ponytail, and she had pink spots high on her cheeks from exertion. “I’m Rose.”
“Sam and Dean,” Sam told her.
Dean backed up, playing the flames across the area where the swamp monster had been, a sort of reverse fireman. The cylinders strapped across his back swayed, and Sam hoped Dean had been right about how they wouldn’t blow up.
Finally Dean reached the clump of trees where Sam and Rose were standing. He nodded his head and shut off the nozzle but didn’t take his eyes off of the mass of smoke.
Sam’s eyes were burning. “Got any ideas for how to make sure it’s dead?” he asked.
Rose raised her sticks and swirled them again, looking for all the world like a woman miming large-scale knitting. The smoke settled down to the ground, revealing a lot of burning vegetation, including an enormous lump now lumbering towards them on its quasi-hands and knees. The napalm had stuck to it, dripping through its body so that the sticks and leaves on the outside were lit up from within even as they shriveled.
“Hunh,” Dean said. “I thought it’d go down faster.”
They ran. Sam would have bet on surviving several hits from the thing if it hadn’t been covered with napalm, but as it was he just fired his shells when he had the chance to knock off larger protrusions. Rose proved equally good at aiming her sticks backwards.
By the time they were faltering and out of breath, the swamp monster was down to the size of a golden retriever, and they could afford to make a stand and blast it into its component plants. Rose’s last hit got a ball of dirt at its center that exploded it outwards like a pumpkin.
Sam looked back at their path, a line of smoldering and still-burning debris, and wondered how he’d gotten to the point that thinking ‘that went well’ was not satirical.
Meanwhile, Dean was shucking off the backpack and demonstrating how he’d put it together, so caught up in his own awesomeness that he barely seemed aware that Rose was a good-looking woman wearing a tight sleeveless T-shirt.
“What about the sorcerer?” Sam asked, raising his voice enough to get their attention.
“Sorcerer?” Rose asked.
It developed that Rose hadn’t contacted the sorcerer either. She’d heard about the swamp monster from an entirely different network, a group of enviro-pagans.
Sam scrutinized her as she told Dean war stories, and heard a few in return. Along with the carved spell-sticks, she had a shoulder holster carrying a semiautomatic and a ten-inch knife sheath on her hip. Scars across her biceps, and one faint on her left cheek, suggested some familiarity with hunting.
He wasn’t thrilled that she invited herself along on the search for the sorcerer. Not that they had an exclusive right to go after him, so he couldn’t say anything.
****
Four hours later, he listened to the sound of Rose kicking her knife over towards him while he struggled with the ropes binding him to one of the big sacrificial posts in the sorcerer’s workshop. Her aim was excellent and the sorcerer didn’t seem to notice the change when he swiveled away from Dean to check on them.
The fact that the sorcerer hadn’t decided to hang Sam from his wrists the way he’d done Rose was their only hope; chalk one up for being too tall for low ceilings.
The sorcerer turned back to Dean, who was refusing to retreat from the little protective arc he’d scrawled just in front of the workroom door. Sam forbore from yelling at Dean again and squatted. He ignored the tearing in his shoulders and his thighs and shuffled himself around the post until he could fumble the blade into his fingers. He felt the blood dripping hot down his fingers before he noticed the pain of the cuts. He levered the knife slowly up until he could let the hilt slide into his palm and hoped Rose cared as much about balance as she did about edge.
Dean ramped up the imprecations; at this point, Sam thought, he was insulting the sorcerer’s third cousins, not to mention his fashion sense.
Sam forced himself back to his feet and began sawing through the ropes, trying to keep his arms in the same position as they’d been tied in case the sorcerer looked back too soon. His grip was blood-slick.
The sorcerer strode jauntily over to a table on the side of the room and retrieved a rapier. Sam felt the first rope part. But they were heavy and coated with something slippery enough that even Rose’s blade had trouble staying in place long enough to slice through the strands.
Dean stopped mouthing off when he saw the rapier, but he didn’t move from the circle. There was no escape backwards, even if Dean would have been willing to take it; the sorcerer’s panther waited if Dean tried to retreat.
“What, out of insults now?” the sorcerer asked, nearly cooing. “The cat doesn’t have your tongue, does she? Not yet anyway.”
“Wow,” Dean said. “That stunk worse than your breath.”
Second rope. Sam felt the whole knot give a little, but not enough to free him.
The sorcerer jabbed Dean’s shoulder, forcing him back to the edge of his circle. Blood soaked quickly through Dean’s shirt. If Dean made noise, Sam couldn’t hear it. Dean tried to block the next blow with his arm, but the sorcerer just disengaged, poked him in the belly and laughed.
“I can do anything I want to you,” he said. “Your friends get to watch. You’re lucky, really, when you think about my plans for them.”
“Hey,” Sam said. The sorcerer stuck his weapon into the top of Dean’s right thigh and twisted, and Dean did yell this time. “Hey, asshole.”
The sorcerer froze and turned the top half of his body back towards Sam. “Your cr—”
He blinked once and fell, the hilt of the knife fetched up against his Adam’s apple. Dean dodged and managed to shove the body through the door before slamming it behind him. Wet sounds came from the hallway. Apparently the panther hadn’t appreciated being bound to service.
Sam hurried to Dean, who was already limping to the closest bench. Dean grimaced at the dried-up body parts in his way, then swept a space clear with his hand and sat heavily down.
Rose waited as patiently as he could have expected while he tied up Dean’s wounds. She sighed with relief when he released her and began rubbing her own shoulders even as she hurried to the place where the sorcerer had tossed her weapons.
“Thanks for the knife,” Sam told her.
“Thanks for throwing it.”
“We should see about finding the hunters’ bodies,” Dean said from the bench. “The rest of ‘em, I mean. This is a salt and burn if I ever saw one.”
“I’ll check upstairs,” Sam said. On the way in, he’d seen the sorcerer’s library.
Fifteen minutes later, Dean and Rose appeared in the door. Sam looked up from the pile he’d assembled. “Come on, Sam,” Dean said.
“I’ve still got two bookshelves—”
“We’ve got two minutes before the fire comes upstairs,” Dean said over Rose’s “That’s black magic.”
Sam sucked it up and shoved two thick volumes into Dean’s arms, grabbing the rest of them himself.
“Sam’s just curious,” Dean explained to Rose, who was looking at Sam with new suspicion. She’d retrieved her knife, he saw. He didn’t ask what they’d done with the panther.
****
Later, over drinks, Rose let them get away with an extremely abbreviated version of their life stories, which might have had something to do with the way that she turned every question about herself into an anecdote about magic or demons. When she mentioned a few practices that weren’t exactly white magic, Sam raised his eyebrow; she bit her lip and didn’t mention the sorcerer’s books again.
“We should keep in touch,” Rose said after Dean had boasted of his tulpa-exterminating prowess. “I don’t have a predictable schedule, but who knows? If you guys calm down and stop charging into situations unprepared, we might end up fighting the same bad guys again one of these days.”
Dean drained his beer. “Prepared enough for today,” he said as he set the empty down with a thunk.
“Please,” she said. “We got captured, you got tortured. If you’re happy with the results, I’d hate to see your definition of half-assed.”
Sam snorted despite himself.
Rose leaned back in her seat. “I do have one question, though.”
“This I gotta hear,” Dean said.
Rose examined them in turn. “Are you two just as crazy in other ways?”
Dean smiled at her, but there was a thin layer of ice over it now. Sam took a little longer to get it, and felt every capillary in his skin filling up with blood. “Sorry, no,” he said, stumbling over the words. He was already imagining it anyway: Rose between them, kissing Rose’s shoulder, kissing past it to latch his mouth onto Dean’s collarbone, putting his hands on breasts and chests and thighs, anything he wanted to touch open to him. Pressing her between them like her namesake, letting her draw blood if she wanted, hot and close and wet. Sam dug his fingers into his thigh, grounding himself.
Dean was watching him sidelong. “Hey,” he said. “I’m going to turn in. You make sure she gets back to her room safe, little brother.”
Sam frowned in annoyance, but Rose just smiled, wide and slow. She didn’t protest that she was a big girl.
“Actually, I’m pretty tired too,” he said abruptly, his eyes fixed on Dean’s retreating back. “I’m sorry,” he told her, and sort of meant it.
Rose shrugged, her mouth quirking up in a way that highlighted just how attractive she was. “Worth a try. You boys take care, now.”
“You too,” he said, totally sincere this time. He threw enough money down to cover their tab and took off.
Dean was just sitting in the car, holding on to the wheel, when Sam caught up with him. He jerked in surprise when Sam tapped on the glass of the passenger side. Dean didn’t ask, just started the car and drove them back.
The place they were staying had poor framing; the bathroom door wouldn’t stay fully closed, drifting a couple of inches open no matter what Sam did.
Sam couldn’t see much, only a slice of Dean’s shoulder, twisting and turning. Dean was on his back, then on his stomach, then on his back again. Sam leaned his head back against too-warm tile and put his fist in his lap, his cock throbbing relentlessly, fever-hot against his spit-slick palm.
He imagined biting down on Dean’s neck, licking down the lines of his pelvic cut, touching the inside of his elbow and the back of his knee and all the other soft places.
He came just before Dean finished, and had to flush the tissue standing on still-wobbly legs. Dean didn’t seem to notice Sam’s distraction when he stumbled into the bathroom, which was the only mercy Sam needed.
Next part.
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He knew why the spirits wanted what they wanted, and he would have torn out his own eyes if that could have removed the knowledge.
“Fine,” Dean said, then looked out the window, rubbing his thumb across his bottom lip. Sam remembered how swollen and soft Dean’s lips had looked last night, afterwards.
Sam's fetishizing of his brother's body is really interesting. It's not despite the injuries--the wounds seem to be part of the thrill. I assume that's all tied up with the big ol' guilt/angst/anger ball at the center of Sam.
I have a feeling I know where this is going. Let's see if I'm right!
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